Jellyfish

Bright Future, another recent dark film from the great Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, focuses on working class folks whose future is anything but bright. The irony of the title is pounded home in scene after scene. Yuji and Mamoru, friends in their 20s who work at the same boring job in the same dull warehouse, are both frustrated with their lives. But there is a big difference.

While Mamoru looks around carefully and gives Yuji knowing glances, and tells Yuji when to Wait and when to Go Ahead (capital letters used on purpose), Yuji is content to live in his dreams in which, he says in a voice-over, he sees himself as having a bright future. Mamoru has a pet poisonous jellyfish, which he bequeaths to Yuji when something terrible happens and Mamoru lands in prison.

Their boss, a man of 55, is just as frustrated with his boring existence as his two workers, and Mamoru's father is, as well, a man who labors at a thankless job that keeps him confined to a small space; he fixes broken appliances in a salvage shop.

When the jellyfish escapes from Yuji, he panics, then relaxes when he realizes that it is, in essence, following him wherever he goes. Kurosawa always fuses fantasy with reality in his films and this one is no exception. Although an obvious symbol for escape from a humdrum existence, the jellyfish turns out to be something more than that as well. This is brought home later in the film when we see a flotilla of the things moving out to sea in the Tokyo canal...

KK, as I like to call him--to distinguish him from Akira Kurosawa--makes films like no one else today. It's easy and at the same time intriguing to read into his films more than what we see and chances are that the added meanings we find are right. I think we know this because his films resonate long after leaving the theater; the layers of meaning we find in them continue to make themselves apparent without much effort at all.

Bright Future is a film about significantly more than people who spend their time, their lives in futile activity. It's about whether or not we think about how to live our lives, about whether we value the time that we have, or how we value it, if we do at all. It's about how we try to move beyond what we have and how that usually fails. It's a sad film but one that upon reflection makes us think that maybe there is, after all, a chance for a bright future. Or maybe not.

"Bright Future (Akarui mirai)" feels very much like a Sam Shephard play, with its themes of stifling fathers and rebelling sons and sibling responsibility between brothers, all suffused with irrational violence.

There's even a continuing leitmotif of a cowboy Western musical riff when magic realism takes over from the unrelieved quotidian of men who work with the detritus of an almost post-apocalyptic-seeming society, from a laundry to an appliance recycling workshop, and condescended to by their biological and putative family members with more money and much nicer apartments.

The characters seem to need to strike out with either Raskolnikov-ian or manipulative acts of violence as existential acts to affect their environment ("acclimating to Tokyo" is how one character metaphorically puts it) to be sure they're alive or having an impact on the living.

The main characters, well-matched by Tadanobu Asano as the scarily manipulative brother figure and Jô Odagiri as his even more depressed acolyte, are so alienated that the rigid others around them assume they are developmentally disabled.

I'm quite sure I didn't get anywhere near all the Goddard-ian symbolism, from the production design of the characters' seedy living arrangements to the phosphorescent beauty of poisonous jellyfish, which are used beyond the frogs in "Magnolia" in entrancing and haunting images like Conrad's fascination of the abomination.

The conclusion seems hopeless in a clouded fade into "A Clockwork Orange"-like, thrill-seeking gang of aimless young men wearing Che T-shirts, with a brightly hypocritical pop song about the future playing on the soundtrack.

I never knew that Tokyo had so many interesting bridges and canals.

I haven't seen any other films written or directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa to know if I just saw a bad print or if the washed out, almost black-and-white, fuzzy digital-video-seeming look was intentional.

Kyoshi Kurosawa is becoming one of my favorite current filmmakers, and the further he gets from conventional horror and shock, the better I think he is.

Deeper meanings mingle with absurdist humor, and the kind of chance occurrences that enliven the fiction of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami also figure heavily in Kurosawa's films; cinematically, everything from Lynch or Fellini to Don Siegel can be a touchstone for further exploration.

BRIGHT FUTURE is like an improved CHARISMA - more refined, less loony, and considerably more poetic, but K Kurosawa's many concerns - trashing of the environment, a sense of depersonalization (and discreet nihilism) in younger/future generations, the erosion of a society's cohesiveness (especially when that erosion originates within, and not from some external source) - are handled very well - the last shot offers his darkest humor, with the cross-generational understanding becoming something quietly heroic evoking certain past masters of Japanese film. A sense that - if younger generations have drifted towards a nihilism that could destroy them or you, it is balanced by an equally withering take on the older generations that somehow let them down; this film in many ways visualizes the idea of getting over it, and moving on with life (after presenting some of the consequences for not doing so).

Tadanobu Asano's presence here is somewhat hyped (definitely on the DVD cover), undoubtedly due to his ascendant global stardom, but his performance is eclipsed by co-stars Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, who both deliver dynamic performances of great range and control.

Mysterious, poetic, open to many interpretations, and one of Kyoshi Kurosawa's finest.

Bright Future is about a plot to populate the sewers of Tokyo with a glowing, poisonous jellyfish. So far, so good. There aren't too many movies about plots to populate the sewers of Tokyo with glowing, poisonous jellyfish that I know about. Although the movie has much to commend it, it is ultimately frustrating because characters are constantly doing things not because they make sense but because the filmmaker wants them to in order to advance the plot. Also, the movie has no real ending; it just….ends.

On the one hand, you might say that the movie doesn't have to make sense because it follows a dream logic and dreams don't always make sense. However, the best movies that follow a dream logic, such as Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, have an internal consistency. Actions make sense within the context of the movie. Also, The Exterminating Angel has one of the best endings in all of cinema.

I liked the themes of Bright Future: loneliness, alienation, lack of connection between the generations. I also liked the poisonous jellyfish as a metaphor for disaffected, violent teenagers and 20-somethings. However, I had the feeling that the filmmaker wrote himself into a corner and didn't know how to get out of it. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami does this with his novels. He starts a novel not knowing where it's going but then eventually has to end it, which he almost always does in an unsatisfying manner.

Nevertheless, I keep reading Murakami novels and I'm going to seek out other films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Maybe some day all the ingredients will fall into place and he'll make a masterpiece.

Akarui Mirai has a lot going for it. Somewhere in the mess of metaphor and "art for art's sake" is a good story with a strong message and good images. Unfortunately things get typically nonsensical with the lesser Kurosawa behind the camera. Ok, that's harsh, but why can't this guy find a way to tell his story coherently AND make use of the positive aspects of his style. I like art-house movies, I like esoteric Japanese dramas, I like quirky filmmaking, but I don't like this movie. It's the type of movie I dislike most in fact, it's a badly made film pretending to be a good one. I trusted it, and it basically took me for a ride to nowhere and left me there.

I admit, the movie has it's moments, the lyrical beauty of the Jellyfish, one of the movie's most powerful images, are wonderful. The performance of the leads is good. There's some humor sprinkled here and there, but for what reason? I couldn't read the tone of the movie... Is this a fariytale? Is it a drama? There's just so much jammed onto that screen, and yet nothing. It's basically a bunch of nice ideas, presented in an incredibly lifeless manner. I can't imagine who would find any of this fulfilling?