I find it difficult to speak with anything approaching objectivity towards Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 film Confessions. It is, in so many ways, another in a long line of grim, misanthropic anti-thrillers that many directors, like Austria's Michael Haneke, have been producing over the last decade. And yet, while I find most of those movies to range from hateful to begrudgingly admirable, Confessions straight-up blindsided me.
The movie begins with what is essentially a its own contained short film. It’s the end of term and Class B’s teacher, Ms. Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) informs her unruly class that she won’t be returning after break. As the ensuing celebration dies down, she starts to talk about the recent death of her 4-year-old daughter, which she reveals was caused by two of her own students. After the class is well-and-truly riled up, she reveals one final piece of information, a cruel trick that she has perpetrated on the culprits (you can find out the nature of said trick in almost any synopsis of the film, but it’s such an effective shock moment that I'm loathe to spoil it).
Only after this does the story proper, adapted by Nakashima from a novel by Kanae Minato, kick into gear. The rest of the movie takes the form of a series of overlapping spoken confessions by several of the students in Moriguchi’s class as the ramifications of her actions start to take hold. As with any such film, however, the machinations of the plot are simply a springboard, here for a film about the cruelty that children are capable of, and the adult behaviour that enables it - as well as questions about the value of human life and the morality of revenge, and an attack on Japan's laws about criminal offenders to boot. Questions which, of course, the film has no interest in providing answers for. So far, so much like any other grim, provocative art-thriller.
The key difference is, I think, that where so many of those other movies traffic in an aesthetic of cynical detachment, Nakashima is operating in a style that’s much more meditative and openly emotional. Instead of feeling clinical and airless, Confessions is moody and frequently melodramatic. Nakashima tends to crowd his mise en scène, bringing the characters’ emotions out into the film frame to surround them, and renders each confession as something of a tone poem. Aiding and abetting the visuals are a small handful of licensed songs, used and repeated with the precision of a bullet (the second appearance of Radiohead’s “Last Flowers” in particular destroyed me) to create a thick atmosphere of unreality.
This heightened reality serves a double purpose of creating an environment where the most histrionic parts of the screenplay and the more outlandish plot twists feel more plausible, as well as making the ideas in play that much more confronting and affecting. I haven't seen either of Nakashima's earlier cult-hit films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but my understanding is that Confessions is working on a totally different level to those movies, and doesn't seem to stem from his earlier work at all.
It’s true that after all this, up to and including its twisted punchline, Confessions only really adds up to so much provocation. But effective provocation has its place in cinema too, and Confessions is, as far as I'm concerned, effective and then some. It succeeded in utterly devastating me in spite of my instinctive resistance to material like this, and left me in a state of dumbfounded awe. And for that, I can only concede defeat to Tetsuya Nakashima and his tremendous suckerpunch of a film.
The movie begins with what is essentially a its own contained short film. It’s the end of term and Class B’s teacher, Ms. Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) informs her unruly class that she won’t be returning after break. As the ensuing celebration dies down, she starts to talk about the recent death of her 4-year-old daughter, which she reveals was caused by two of her own students. After the class is well-and-truly riled up, she reveals one final piece of information, a cruel trick that she has perpetrated on the culprits (you can find out the nature of said trick in almost any synopsis of the film, but it’s such an effective shock moment that I'm loathe to spoil it).
Only after this does the story proper, adapted by Nakashima from a novel by Kanae Minato, kick into gear. The rest of the movie takes the form of a series of overlapping spoken confessions by several of the students in Moriguchi’s class as the ramifications of her actions start to take hold. As with any such film, however, the machinations of the plot are simply a springboard, here for a film about the cruelty that children are capable of, and the adult behaviour that enables it - as well as questions about the value of human life and the morality of revenge, and an attack on Japan's laws about criminal offenders to boot. Questions which, of course, the film has no interest in providing answers for. So far, so much like any other grim, provocative art-thriller.
The key difference is, I think, that where so many of those other movies traffic in an aesthetic of cynical detachment, Nakashima is operating in a style that’s much more meditative and openly emotional. Instead of feeling clinical and airless, Confessions is moody and frequently melodramatic. Nakashima tends to crowd his mise en scène, bringing the characters’ emotions out into the film frame to surround them, and renders each confession as something of a tone poem. Aiding and abetting the visuals are a small handful of licensed songs, used and repeated with the precision of a bullet (the second appearance of Radiohead’s “Last Flowers” in particular destroyed me) to create a thick atmosphere of unreality.
This heightened reality serves a double purpose of creating an environment where the most histrionic parts of the screenplay and the more outlandish plot twists feel more plausible, as well as making the ideas in play that much more confronting and affecting. I haven't seen either of Nakashima's earlier cult-hit films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but my understanding is that Confessions is working on a totally different level to those movies, and doesn't seem to stem from his earlier work at all.
It’s true that after all this, up to and including its twisted punchline, Confessions only really adds up to so much provocation. But effective provocation has its place in cinema too, and Confessions is, as far as I'm concerned, effective and then some. It succeeded in utterly devastating me in spite of my instinctive resistance to material like this, and left me in a state of dumbfounded awe. And for that, I can only concede defeat to Tetsuya Nakashima and his tremendous suckerpunch of a film.
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