Labyrinth of Cinema (2019)

 

Director: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Screenplay: Kazuya Konaka, Tadashi Naitô and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi    

Cast: Takuro Atsuki as Mario; Yoshihiko Hosoda as Shigeru; Takahito Hosoyamada as Hosuke; Rei Yoshida as Noriko; Riko Narumi as Kazumi Saitō; Hirona Yamazaki as Kazuko Yoshiyama; Takako Tokiwa as Yuriko Tachibana; Yukihiro Takahashi as Fanta G

Canon Fodder

 

Don't we all love Tarzan?

Labyrinth of Cinema has a lot to unpack, the last film of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, a film's whose tone is immediately set up when Hinton Battle gets a name check in the opening credits for not able to be involved with the production, the gentle heart shown already in the film's chest in name checking the veteran Tony Award winning American actor, singer, dancer, and dance instructor who was unable to even provide in-film support or assistance to the production, even if it does have musical numbers. We have not even gotten to the spaceship with floating fish floating inside, and pianos and nude people passing by outside its windows, the ship belonging to Fanta G (Yellow Magic Orchestra member and musician Yukihiro Takahashi), travelling back to Japan and explaining to the viewer how we descend into war before he reaches a small cinema in Onomichi. A city, called a shore town in film, within the Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, facing the Inland Sea, that in itself will be significant as Labyrinth of Cinema will go through Japan's military history, as is the fact (brought up in the film when establishing the setting) it was not bombed due to having a prisoner of war camp during the Pacific War¹, unchanged as a result from the forties through Fanta G's narrative. (That the location also features in Tokyo Story (1953) as a key setting, the most famous film directed by Yasujirō Ozu, is important to mention when Ozu himself makes a cameo).  On its last night, the cinema is screening a night of war films; there a film buff, a film history maniac, and a wannabe yakuza and debt collector who is a son of a monk, coming together only find themselves entering the silver screen after Noriko (Rei Yoshida), a teen girl working there is sucked in abruptly, aptly just after thunder and lightning outside mid-screening.

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi managed to have two last films. He was diagnosed with stage-four terminal cancer² before he set about directing Hanagatami (2017), based on a 1937 novel by Kazuo Dan, a war drama set in the dawn of World War II about a group of youths in a seaside town at the period. On Hanagatami, Ôbayashi was a veteran director, famous in the West for the delirious House (1977) but prolific in his home country, who was making the film aware he had a terminal illness. Including its ending, cutting to Ôbayashi himself talking to the viewer, he had the perfect last film in Hanagatami. How befitting he managed to live long enough to have a second film as good as an ending instead, and before the film's plot even properly starts, Labyrinth of Dreams burns in style. Title cards, coloured borders, repetition of previous fragments of scenes, even the obvious CGI and super imposition of modern 2010s cinema aesthetic clearly deliberate as tools for a man whose used artificiality as back in House, showing he never shied away from this.

Subtitled "A movie - To explore cinematic literature", the film when it begins properly suggests a wholesome farce with a musical, only for this type of cinema in Japan to have originated for propaganda reasons at the time, or was a film made after Japan lost the Pacific War, made during the period in occupied Japan where the US army would have censored content, which they did. Underscored with poetry by Chūya Nakahara, whose poem calling modernism a new form of barbarism is the most evoked, Labyrinth of Cinema over nearly three hours does not hide with how Ôbayashi, especially in his later films, was a man born in 1938 coming to terms with the horrible destruction of the Pacific War and World War II caused. He is not hiding either his view Japan's own government was as responsible for this and taking the side of humanity over the blind militarisation that led to this history. The film, truthfully, refers to content that may not be as widely known overseas unless you have a lot of knowledge of Japanese cinema or its culture, Labyrinth of Cinema a history lesson on its nation's path and its cinema in a dense yet playful form, the history of Japan intermingled with their history of movies and art, such as the silent film naturally having intertitles, even with dialogue, when the leads end up within one.

Japan here is a history of civil war, strafes of radicals against the establishment, samurai made obsolete by foreign imported guns, nationalism, and Japan's relationship to other countries. Everyone is explained even if a figure a Japanese viewer would know of. Sakamoto Ryōma, for example, was a samurai and is one of the many who wanted to interact with the likes of North America but died too young when assassinated. Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman Toshiro Mifune played in film over a trilogy between 1954-56, is here as an old man, and cinema is evoked in Yasujirō Ozu, the legendary auteur, making a cameo alongside Sadao Yamanaka, the director whose Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) was tragically one of the only works from a creator whose life was cut short before his time in the Imperial Japanese Army when drafted. Yamanaka's tale is more tragic as his work has been mostly lost in cinema due to this time period - the Japanese government burned many of his more provocative films and then years later Douglas MacArthur, the general of the American Army during the Pacific War, and the US army during the occupying era destroyed others among other filmmakers that were considered anti-democratic in view, leaving only three of Yamanaka's films left in existence³. Even John Ford makes a cameo, played by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi himself who also plays the mysterious pianist we cut to through the film, the American director famous especially for his westerns held in admiration as he admires Japan's spirit here. With Frank Capra held up too, dubbed "Franz Kafra" and It's A Wonderful Life (1946) admired as the failed production that nonetheless became legendary, this is a work championing humanity over the brutality of war, aptly so when Sadao Yamanaka was a cineaste who admired American films from the period of his life including Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934)⁴.

Labyrinth of Cinema under the weight of its own subject, trying to deal with the 20th century by way of Japan's history, dances a very precarious line between the severity of the material and a lighter touch, the film able to get away with fart sounds for humour even in serious moments. The three leads, following Noriko, witness the battle of Wakamatsu Castle in 1868, when a troupe of women and children had to fight to defend the grounds, or appearing among the Sakura trope, an almost all-female acting group, in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. The film takes a more universal approach to the causes of war, as you follow people who served in the Japanese army in the Pacific War, and for everyone who joined under the desire to invade, and one sadist notwithstanding, others are stuck in other countries and trying their hardest to help the locals. Even if Noriko's actress is Japanese, it is poignant when she plays a Chinese girl, in a Japanese invaded Manchuria with the horrors of this explored, one which is a controversial subject still in Japan to discuss.

The film as well, if it does demonise an entity, shows the horror of war and blind nationalism in general, evoking an entire sequence in Okinawa when even Japan's own civilians were murdered by their own army in their ever closing defeat. With his last film, Ôbayashi's playfulness from the years before comes with a jest for humanity, for Doctor Muddlehead the empathetic animated character, or for a macabre turn on a famous scene in House when "bullets are playing the piano". When it cuts to a story of how, when Chopin's music was banned in Japan under nationalist laws, deemed enemy music, a school of young teenager girls protected a C. Bechstein piano that the Japanese army was to dispose of. (That the film subtly references the term "enemy language" throughout the dialogue for certain non-Japanese terms emphasises this sense of Japan entirely isolating itself during the war). The call for humanity over the evil force of war and might is felt for Ôbayashi's own call. In the Sakura trope's segment, before the tragedy of horrors of the atomic bomb, this is evoked in how their play is Ricksaw Man, a work censored by the Japanese army in the narrative; this went as far in real life for Hiroshi Inagaki's 1943 cinematic version of the story to be censored, severe censorship cuts by both the wartime Japanese government and post-war US occupation forces, a story he remade in 1958 with Toshiro Mifune⁵. The mindlessness of war, to conqueror and devour rather than create and inspire, is Ôbayashi's real enemy here.

As his own final film, the actual final film, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi went perfectly. As his career is slowly growing reputation in the West, becoming more complex as we learn he went from spectacles based on manga, from Kazuo Umezu to even Osamu Tezuka's Blackjack manga, to more intimate dramas over the decades, the films slowly being made available in the West. As much of this, to be honest, is from them being bootlegged by people just wishing to see the director of House's entire career, but as the official releases are being released and are appreciated into the 2020s, the promise was so much in mind to this that Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's reputation will grow and grow over the decades. This film lightly ends with a song, one made post-war by a comedian criticising the point of military might whilst you could have funded places for him to cuddle with his girlfriend, at a point Japan was rebuilding itself and would become affluent again; even in just that, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's choices for how to criticise the worse in humanity with the most tender of touches is perfect.

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1) For reference, Onomichi site serves as POW memorial, published on the 15th April 2013 on the DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service) website, written by Cpl. Kenneth Trotter Jr.

2) Tokyo Film Festival: Nobuhiko Obayashi Re-enters ‘Labyrinth of Cinema’ by Mark Schilling, published on Variety on the 27th October 2019.

3) Director Profile: Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938) by Andrew Bacon. Posted on the 8th April 2016 for The Projection Booth website.

4) Fleeting Glimpses: The three-film universe of Sadao Yamanaka by Chris Fujiwara. Posted the 11th September 2009 on the Museum of the Moving Image.  

5) A documentary short Wheels of Fate: The Story of the Rickshaw Man (2020) even exists in regards to this, as Masahiro Miyajima, the camera assistant for cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, made it his mission to restore The Rickshaw Man even if it was his last task in life.