Fighting the Man

[steepholm]

It's not often I go to the cinema twice in a week, but this week I did - first, to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (which I wanted to see because I'd enjoyed Seven Psychopaths), and today to Japanese Girls Never Die (in Japanese, アズミ・ハルコは行方不明 or Haruko Azumi is Missing).

Walking through Stokes Croft to get to the cinema, I saw this piece of graffiti alluding to the first film - and, since the second is in part about graffiti, it formed a nice visual handshake:



I liked them both. Billboards was certainly the more polished of the two, and the characters were more complex (albeit working with familiar templates). Japanese Girls was less predictable, more exciting and risky, perhaps precisely because it felt as if it was slightly less safe in the director's hands. Both had a kind of small-town-where-everyone-knows-everyone-and-secrets-have-a-short-shelflife vibe, black humour and strangely incompetent police. The Japanese film was making a fairly explicit political statement (for Japan) about gender inequality, but ended up as a kind of female power anthem. I'm not sure whether Billboards was making any kind of statement, other than a plea for human understanding. And that's fine; I was glad to see both.

Comments

[sovay]

Walking through Stokes Croft to get to the cinema, I saw this piece of graffiti alluding to the first film - and, since the second is in part about graffiti, it formed a nice visual handshake

Oh, wow.

I don't think I've even heard of Japanese Girls Never Die. Can I ask you more about it?

[steepholm]

The plot is about Haruko, who lives a fairly normal but dead-end life, working in a company that will never pay her properly and is run by a couple of sexist no-goods. One day she goes missing, and her missing poster is taken up as a tag by a couple of graffiti artists (themselves inspired by a book and film that seem like a nod to Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop). Both are carelessly exploiting the affections of another young woman. The image goes viral, and the graffiti artists get kudos as a result.

Put that way it sounds like quite a depressing film about women's exploitation, but there's more going on than that. The style is interesting, with lots of cutting back and forth in time, so that times when Haruko has not yet disappeared are juxtaposed with times when she's still around, and two blend together. I took from that that even when she was there she was invisible, but conversely it means that when she goes missing (by her own choice, as it turns out), she becomes free.

Perhaps the strangest thing is the occasional appearance of a gang of high school girls, who are shown randomly attacking lone men out at night and beating them to a pulp. Their carefree camaraderie and way of life are unexplained - none of them has a name - and their actions go unpunished.

[shewhomust]

That is a wonderful piece of graffiti - may I repost?

[steepholm]

Of course - feel free!