Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

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.

Letters From Our Fathers

It is almost impossible for me to believe that Letters From Iwo Jima (originally given the far better title of Red Sun, Black Sand) was filmed back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers. There isn't a single complaint that I leveled at that film that hasn't been deliberately excised from its sibling with surgical precision. It's just as well, too, because the American-made film focusing on the Japanese who fought at Iwo Jima as a companion to a film that was already hopelessly indelicate could very easily have been a total disaster. Instead, it ended up the finest war movie of the last decade.

Eastwood clearly knew how much was riding on the movie, because all the stops have been pulled out in making sure everything hews as close to real Japanese culture as humanly possible. Understanding that there was no way Paul Haggis could be allowed anywhere near the material, Eastwood instead hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita (a woman with precisely zero other film credits, before or since) to pen the script. Haggis gets a story credit, but I suspect it may just be because Letters parallels his Flags script, as it must. The cast is also composed entirely of Japanese actors speaking their native language in place of the usual Hollywood approach of casting a slew of Pan-Asian actors and letting them butcher dialogue in a language that they quite possibly don't speak at all. I'm far too Caucasian to pass judgement myself, but the tremendous critical and commercial success that Letters saw in Japan makes me fairly comfortable in believing that there are no serious representational gaffes here.

The level of dedication shines through in the film itself. It's impossible to doubt for a second the filmmakers' dedication to their characters. If Flags was already a war film of unusual humanity, Letters bests it by a spectacular margin. Like Flags it focuses on three particular soldiers in the fight for Iwo Jima without ever really being about them at all. Where Flags was also about those men struggling to come to terms with life after the fact, Letters is instead about the fact that these men are going to die, and they know it. The letters of the title are written by the film's characters to their families, but they are written for the characters themselves, who know full-well that neither they or the letters will ever leave Iwo.

If I described Flags as 'restrained', the only adjective I could rightfully level at Letters is 'meditative'. In my review of Flags of Our Fathers I said that Iwo Jima was by far the most important character in the film*, and that it was never better than the moments it returned to that island. Letters From Iwo Jima (aside from a handful of flashbacks) never leaves those shores, and this allows it to settle into a steady rhythm, following the Japanese soldiers as they each continue trying to exist in the only way they know how. Even when the war finally reaches the island it's made to feel like an inevitable fact of life introducing further complications to the characters than the bloody combat that it really is. Even more than Flags the warfare is painted in broad, abstract strokes, with cinematography so desaturated that it more suggests colours rather than capturing them on film.

With its gentle rhythm, stripped-down aesthetic and endless reserves of humanity it's difficult not to become caught up in the lives of those Japanese soldiers yourself. When the inevitable comes and people start dying, their removal from the film's fabric feels more painful than the countless hectic, brutally violent war-film deaths. Being an Eastwood film, it's entirely unsurprising that Letters is a formal masterpiece. Being an Eastwood film, it's altogether surprising and greatly pleasing that it should so perfectly balance bitter anti-war outrage and raw emotion without ever feeling less than absolutely genuine. The director is genuinely not known for keeping his emotions in check, but he manages it here with grace to spare.

That Letters From Iwo Jima is alone the finest war film in a decade, probably more** would alone make it worthy of being remembered. The real magic, though, occurs in a roughly twenty-minute passage in the middle of the film where it directly overlaps with Flags of Our Fathers. In these moments the two films together do something that transcends either of them. No matter which of the two you are watching, it becomes impossible not to think of the very real men and their struggles on the opposite side of the battle, even as they appear no larger than ants milling about before the camera. In this way, both films (Flags especially, since it had further to climb) overcome their limitations, even many of the ones endemic to the medium, to become among the most powerful and effective anti-war statements ever conceived.

*At least, I wish I had.

**With the concession that The Thin Red Line beggars a descriptor like that.