Beautiful New Bay Area Project (2013)

 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Mao Mita as Takako, Tasuku Emoto as Amano

Canon Fodder

 

Of all the projects you have never expect from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, though he has made some beautiful ones himself as well as terrifying examples, a martial arts short film commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival is still unexpected. This is still in mind to a director who began in pinku cinema and like a lot of his generation juggled genres, connectable to even someone like Takashi Miike in terms of being both V-Cinema (straight-to-video) veterans who have been eclectic in their creative output into the modern day. But martial arts in cinema involves a lot of additional choreography and planning even separate from a director who can transition between horror like Cure (1997) to dramas. Contextually though, what the short film is makes sense in his world.

The set-up is that, becoming love sick for a female labourer named Takako (Mao Mita), the president of an urban planning company named Amano (Tasuku Emoto) becomes obsessed with her whilst he is the acting head of a new development project at a wharf. His is not a pleasant romance, as she is not interested and his decision to steal her name tag from the employee board, rather than the prologue for a cute romantic comedy, leads to her having to retrieve it back even if her skill in martial arts have to be used, beating every security guard and grunt before him. For what is a genre film in less than thirty minutes that is playful, Beautiful New Bay Area Project is still idiosyncratic and part of Kurosawa's themes, with a lot to still unpack. Set in terms of modernising an industrial area, we have an idyllic new project to completely rehaul the environment which is demonstrated by even having its own model diorama in the offices. This is obviously the kind of utopia future architecture, no matter how much the management says is good, that is to hold with suspicion. The office itself is septic white and looks build from easy-to-deconstruct materials. It has an atmosphere but is obvious cold to the real, working factory and wharf environments which Takako hails from.

She herself, in a monologue to the camera, talks of having been born from the sea like a mermaid, a figure of working class who is juxtaposed to the coldness of an office urban world that, when an unseen mouse appears in the front office, causes all the staff to flee in terror regardless of who they are. Japan has had a fascinating balance between its heritage, its old history and culture, and the most advanced of modernism, but that does not mean that the schism has been a problem to tackle in its art. Kurosawa has tackled this before, his horror film Pulse (2001) imagining if the dead interacted with the living, and took over the world through the internet, as much a metaphor for the isolation of people as it was a literal apocalyptic scenario. Beautiful New Bay Area Project is, for all intense purposes, a fun spin in a genre the filmmaker has never dabbled in, but this is prominent. As is the fact that the management and officer workers are literally divided from the working class by tape, as there is a hint of a norovirus that Amano is isolated from by his goon-like management and the vans he is whisked off in.

Amano is in another scenario the character who you gain sympathy for, told he is a cog who needs to work in the machine to keep it working, his achievement with all the cogs more important than he the individual piece, which is explicitly told to him by an aide. He becomes, as he says himself, the cog which has broken off, but in a twist, he is not sympathetic at all. His love for Takako is sick, and the transgression to steal her name tag, stealing his identity, offends her. Licking it is definitely not acceptable and just gross unless she was to have consented to it. This presents the other idiosyncratic aspect that, when the first fight comes mid-way through, this is still a martial arts fight film. You need to remember that for a film for the Hong Kong film festival, the country with its rich history of martial arts cinema, Japan has its own which shines here that may not be prominently talked of in their entertainment. Not as much talked of, Japan has a history of elaborate fight sequences. Most will know of it if they know the tokusatsu superhero sub-genre, particularly all the shows into the modern day like the Ultraman franchise where costumed heroes fight monsters, or the history of Sonny Chiba, a cult hero in cinema who founded the J.A.C (Japan Action Club) school for stunt and martial arts performers for his nation's cinema. If you have least seen Chiba's iconic film The Street Fighter (1974), brutal and blunt is the best way to describe the action in Bay Area Project, not of elaborate flips but the credible ways a smaller woman in the female lead can take down men twice her size.   

The fights when they come are exceptional, and Kurosawa to his credit remembered to golden rule to not compromise them by editing or cheats. In fact, the odd juxtaposition of he making a film like this makes one wish he would have continued in this genre, as his themes and tone adds to it. He, for me, likes long scenes and static pauses, which against the stark modern office where the chaos breaks out makes the sudden explosion of violence more striking, the glass tables and white corridors real in the harshness as a person's head collides into them or for Takako to move around, be it by grappling or kicks or biting or keys to the leg or fire extinguisher to the head, to survive.

That the short is that, short, is not detracting. Sadly, this is the type of work in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's career that could be easily missed or forgotten; never even hearing of this until approaching the production for this review, it is a fascinating piece, and in all honestly Mao Mita as a female action lead in itself would be enticing if she had ever continued from this sole film credit. A shame either way.