Together they weather the cold, abusive prison of the asylum, abandoned by their families. The three young adults include the female Coco, a screechy, child-like provocateur with a penchant for black feathers Tsumuji, an angry kid who murdered his teacher after enduring prolonged sexual abuse (as we see in some truly nightmarish dream sequences), and Satoru, who’s a dopey chronic masturbator.
So, the three mental patients, with the demeanor and innocence of children and limited understanding of the world, go on a journey to the “end of the earth” so that they can have a picnic and watch what will surely be the apocalypse. Reading the book backwards (of course), they react to the context-less hellfire found in the book of Revelations in the only rational way one can: they become convinced the world is ending. Picnic has what is, perhaps, one of the most ingenious conceits of any low-budget film: it follows three young adult mental patients, who sneak off from the institution and happen upon a friendly priest, who gives them a Bible and wishes them well. This drifting, ethereal feel would become a prominent motif of Iwai’s films over the next decade. Frequently making use of hand-held cameras, grainy film stocks, smoke machines and mist filters, Shinoda would often drift the audience through scenes, wrapping them playfully through sets and against the actors as if they were made of vapor. Shinoda lent his films a hypnotic, dream-like feel.
WATCH ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU ENG SUB TV
Love Letter also cemented Iwai’s partnership with Noboru Shinoda, a distinctive cinematographer who he’d worked with on one of his short TV films Undo. I can’t find evidence of a UK release (although the Korean DVD is easy to find and has English subtitles).
Love Letter was a hit in Japan and a surprise hit in South Korea (which, in 1995, had only just begun officially releasing Japanese films in cinemas), and was given a theatrical run in the United States, although it never came out on DVD there. To Hiroko’s surprise, she gets a response! After some initial confusion, the two become pen pals, and both end up learning a surprising amount of new information about the man they loved. The letter gets forwarded onto the surviving (female) Itsuki. Hiroko happens upon her late fiancée’s high school yearbook one day, and with her wounds freshly opened, she decides to write a love letter to her beloved, care of his old high school. Miho Nakayama plays double duty as both protagonist Hiroko, still mourning her fiancée, who died in a mountain climbing accident two years ago, and Itsuki, a woman from her fiancée’s hometown – who mysteriously looks just like Hiroko and shares her fiancée’s name. After winning the New Directors Award from the Directors Guild of Japan, he began work on his first feature.Ī tale of lost loves, doppelgangers and mistaken identities, Love Letter was Iwai’s first real theatrical feature. But it wasn’t until his 1993 film Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?, a naturalistic depiction of children growing up in the small town of Iioka that he started attracting attention. For most of the early 1990s Iwai made a number of low-budget one-shot TV movies for Fuji TV. 24 January, 1963) got his start directing music videos and TV work after graduating from Yokoyama National University in 1987. With the notable exception of The Case of Hana and Alice, coming soon from Anime Ltd, his films aren’t easy to get, particularly in the UK, but are well worth the effort and import duties.Ī Sendai native, Iwai (b.
Others, such as Yukihiko Tsutsumi, have stuck to the sort of populist entertainment that doesn’t travel well, but makes for big box office in Japan.īut of the directors of that era, Shunji Iwai is one of the most interesting, possibly because of his films, which lie somewhere in-between the accessibility of mainstream Japanese life and the surrealism that would make for an art-house release.
Some of them, like Hirokazu Kore-eda ( After Life, Nobody Knows), have become perennial favourites of festivals and film buffs all over the world. Back in the 1990s Japan’s local TV industry churned out a number of interesting directors who have since become big names among Japanese film aficionados.