Jason says:
“Have you ever felt yourself gradually turn on a movie? It’s something
that can often be sense in an audience, as each member reaches a
different point that ticks them off, and the feeling of the group
shifts. The mounting feeling that HANA-DAMA is getting further and
further from good is something different, and can make it seem even
more disappointing than a movie that sinks from the start.
“We’re introduced to Mizuki (Rina Sakuragi) cowering in a closet,
locked in there by the other girls in her new class while her teacher
turns a blind eye. She’s been through worse, though, and has apparently
grown into one of those teens who grit their teeth and count the days
until graduation when she can get away from all this and her equally
messed-up parents (Taro Suwa & Kei Fujiwara). Another bullied girl,
Kirie (Maika Shimamura), isn’t made of quite such stern stuff, and
latches onto Mizuki for support. They join Shibanai (Syun Asada), a
truant who has carved out a hiding hole on school grounds and whose
problems come more from faculty than peers. Will that sort of support
be enough to make it through a particularly cruel high school?
“I don’t know if I’d necessarily say I liked this movie for most of its
running time, even beyond how it deals with the sort of cruelty that a
viewer would rather not say he or she enjoyed, or if I’d call it
‘good’, but I kind of admired its frankness about bullying, both among
peer groups and institutionally. It’s not the best-acted or most
inventively written take on the idea, but I bought into it and
sympathized with the characters, even when things were a little
over-the-top. It had a moment I really liked, avoiding predictable,
unsatisfying conflict. And even when the bullying becomes full-fledged
sexual assault, I wanted to see how the characters either dug
themselves out or served as a horrible object lesson.
“And then the outright weird crap kicked in, with a corpse flower
blooming out of Mizuki’s head (something the movie had, despite its
seeming randomness, been leading up to), and it just becomes awful.
There’s no satisfaction in the revenge fantasies that play out
afterward, but no engagement, either. It just gets weirder and nastier
and although some of what’s going on is clearly meant to be symbolic,
it seems both ham-fisted and off the mark much of the time, and while
director and co-writer Hisayasu Sato had done a good job of not making
the sexual acts particularly appealing in the early going, his long
career as a director of pink movies reasserts itself toward the end.
The set-up of this movie was nasty, but there was a point and weight to
it; the end is just gross and numbing, and everything that had been
interesting and genuine is swept aside.
“Worst of all, Mizuki becomes boring. There’s been vitality to Rina
Sakuragi’s performance in the movie up until then, but from that point
forward she’s dull and lifeless. She’d been giving the film’s best
performance, although Maika Shimamura takes what sometimes seems like
overacting and converts it into being a damaged teenager. There are
some absurdly over-the-top characterizations, even beyond how
emotionally volatile or damaged the characters are supposed to be.
“As I said, this was always going to be a problematic movie, but
there’s something really poisonous about it even beyond its admittedly
ugly themes. HANA-DAMA starts out like a movie that has something to
say, but squanders it in what seems like the nastiest, most useless way
possible. 1.75 cats
“Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival:
Fantasia
Underground, DCP)” |
