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October 23, 2005
Sand and Mini Hawaii
Tujiko Noriko’s first film, Sand and Mini Hawaii is showing at Uplink Factory in Udagawa-cho, Shibuya. It just opened today and I went to see it. It’s hard to explain the feeling of this film. It’s more something you need to see, but since it will probably be quite a challenge for most people to see it, here it goes.
Overall I think it leaves quite a strong impression. At this moment I am still carrying quite a tangible sense of how it feels to be inside the world of that film. This is in contrast to the general response I’ve had to films lately where I forget I had even watched anything the day after I see it.
If I had to compare it to the work of any director within my knowlege, I think the closest I could come would be Tsai Ming Liang, but with more dialogue. In this film, Chloe Fabre is to Tujiko as Lee Kang-Sheng is to Ming-Liang. The film is a meditation on that one character; the obsession and eccentricity of their unglamourous life in an urban setting. Beyond that however, Sand and Mini Hawaii is entirely more surreal than Ming-Liang (whose films are surreal, but in a realistic way), meaning more things that are literally impossible happen.
Noriko mentioned before that her lead actress did not want to speak, so one thing that sets the film apart is that all of the dialogue is done in voice over. She voices the main character herself, with various friends filling in the other roles. In fact, none of the actors actually speak, although they all have voices. This fact in itself makes for something of an interesting experience, as well as the fact that it consits of all French actors dubbed over in Japanese.
An overview of some memorable scenes in this film: The opening, in which the main character watches pornography with the man next to her, gently stroking the lump in his pants. A scene soon after, in which she is sitting in some kind of restaurant where she had bought lotto tickets, goes into some kind of dream state and is suddenly naked, desperate to crawl under the table. A strange birthday party in an all-black room, full of people eating hamburgers at what I think was a ping pong table. A scene of elation in which the main character walks through a fashionable part of town imagining fireworks going off, someone dancing in a stupidly cute pink pig costume, and my personal favorite, an overly joyful man dressed as a bunch of french fries that say “French Fries” across the front.
This film has an obvious roughness to it that perhaps convolutes what it is actually about, but adds a certain soul and charm as well. Given a first film I think it shows a whole lot of promise. Also I should add there are singing parts in it (naturally) which basically turn into Tujiko Noriko songs. I’m quite interested to see how sound and music will figure into her future films, as I think it could really play a major role and bring a unique take on things.
I know she learned a lot of things making this, and she’s said the next one will be ten times as good. If you know and understand her music, you probably already have a much better idea than you think as to what this film is like. If this film was one of her albums, I think it would be ハードにさせて。 It is perhaps a hard truth to learn about anyone, but Noriko is the kind of person who has such a unique worldview, it seems that anything she creates is quite worthy of consumption just by virtue of the fact that a little bit of her personality is in it. It just hit me that that statement sits somewhere close to my definition of a pure artist.
Posted by shane at October 23, 2005 03:18 AM