Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Bright Future

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future: Moving On

(Japan, 2001)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is becoming one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, and the further he gets from by-the-book J-horror (preferring to reach further into less categorizable reaches of his own cinematic imagination), the better I think he is.

Here, 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 Dirty Harry can be a point of departure for further exploration.

Bright Future plays like an improved version of Kurosawa's earlier Charisma - more refined, less loony, more serious, and considerably more poetic, but Kurosawa's many thematic 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 in internal dysfunction, and not from some external source) - are handled with great subtlety - the poetically staged final scene also offers his darkest and most ironic visual humor. This is a deliberate contrast to the cross-generational understanding which appears elsewhere in the film, which slowly evolves into a quiet heroism - a quality which pleasantly recalls several past masters of Japanese film, without explicitly referring to any of them. Kurosawa's irony is the 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 sold them short; this film in many ways visualizes many senses of letting go of disappointments and judgements of failure, and moving on with life (after presenting some of the consequences for not doing so).

Tadanobu Asano's presence here is somewhat hyped, undoubtedly due to his nascent global stardom, but his performance here is eclipsed by co-stars Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, who both deliver dynamic performances of phenomenal range and control.

Mysterious, poetic, beautifully shot (on DV), open to many interpretations, and one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's finest.