Japan Cuts 2012: Monsters Club (2011)
Cast: Eita, Ken Ken, Yôsuke Kubozuka
Director: Toshiaki Toyoda
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama | Cult
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s note: The following review is a continuation of Rowena’s Japan Cuts 2012 festival coverage.
After more than a four-year absence from filmmaking—principally due to his arrest in 2005 for possession of banned stimulants—Toyoda Toshiaki returned to cinema with the more than aptly titled The Blood of Rebirth in 2009. However, this film set in a medieval fantasy world is a bit of a departure from all of his previous works of dystopic rebellion in contemporary Japan: bet it in the world of gangsters (Pornostar, 2000) or escaped prisoners (9 Souls, 2003, also screening at Japan Cuts this year); in a high school (Blue Spring, 2001); or in a family context (Hanging Garden, 2005). Enter Toyoda’s latest film, Monsters Club, screening tonight at Japan Cuts, a more veritable return to experimental and exploratory filmmaking. This time Toyoda delivers a mood piece on solitude, inspired by the manifesto of Ted Kazcynski, more familiarly known as the Unabomber. Though in the end Monsters Club reads more like a rough draft exercise to further regain his bearings in filmmaking, Toyoda is moving again in the right, imaginative direction. To begin with, Toyoda here reconnects with actor Eita, who appears in Blue Spring, 9 Souls, and Hanging Garden. If only a film sketch, Monsters Club is nevertheless a work that explores turbulent existential emotions and ideas; Toyoda’s frequent male loner renegade character template; and a compact, economical, even cryptic approach to images.
In fact, one of the film’s early sequences is of a sustained close-up shot of a homemade bomb, with sound effects indicating its delivery to its target, the opening of the package, and then its inevitable explosion. This sequence and its unnerving point of view of the bomb demonstrate not only the film’s overall intriguing economy of sound and images but also encapsulate the narrative. In the efficient span of seventy-one minutes, Toyoda charts the deliberate isolation of the author of this bomb, a young man named Ryoichi (Eita), the memory-monsters that he contends with in his solitude in a log cabin in the dead of winter, and his subsequent, unanticipated encounter once again with society.
…Monsters Club reads more like a rough draft exercise to further regain his bearings in filmmaking, Toyoda is moving again in the right, imaginative direction.
A significant element of the images of Ryoichi going about his business in his cabin—hunting for food in the snow; cooking; making bombs with the signature of “MC,” meaning “Monsters Club”; reading; and writing—is his voiceover. At times prayer-like, other times so matter-of-fact as to be banal, and still other times like a manifesto, Ryoichi’s voiceover speaks of both individual and familial secrets. On the one hand, he speaks against the connectivity of things via technology and various control systems. Autonomy in society is always already tethered, he intones, so the idea of a true revolution begins by cutting oneself off from technology and society. In this way, he gestures towards attaining a power that is not exercised over others but only over oneself, a power that translates into freedom. On the other hand, he speaks of what happened to his family, which seems to greatly determine the kind of life he currently leads. As Ryoichi will discover through the course of the film, such power-freedom is also always already tethered to memory and family, for better or for worse.
At times prayer-like, other times so matter-of-fact as to be banal, and still other times like a manifesto, Ryoichi’s voiceover speaks of both individual and familial secrets.
The singular setting of forest and snow for most of the film then gives Ryoichi’s solitude, his mission as Monsters Club, and his voiceover a netherworldly feel, as if he were caught in some kind of waiting room of hell (of his own making). Hunting through the woods in thick snow at one point, Ryoichi shoots and approaches his prey. As he finishes it off, he says to himself, “I’m alive.” The impact is ironic precisely because of his solitude and acts of terrorism. Yet this simple utterance is perhaps more important than anything else to capture Ryoichi’s thorny state of mind, hovering between life and death, past and present, without simply demonising him.
His hovering state manifests itself in the form of dreams; what could be called hallucinations that involve his brothers and a white creature, or at times his brothers in the guise of creatures or monsters—thus providing another interpretation of the film’s title—and a visit from his sister. These visits, actual, dream or hallucinatory (the lines between them are blurred to a certain extent), operate wonderfully as several things all at once: potential horror elements and projections of Ryoichi’s death wishes, or death drive.
Ryoichi’s dream-induced or hallucinatory conversations with his brothers-monsters also bring into the picture another notable formal aspect of the film, long takes. The few times that Toyoda employs a long take involve Ryoichi by himself or with one of his brothers, inside his cabin, to better intensify the hidden emotions at work in Ryoichi and then slowly build up their externalisation through crying or violence. As a result, Ryoichi is forced to confront the taut tension between his rebellious stance and his family’s tragic past, and where it places him in the real world and beyond.
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