Hey folks, Harry here with the latest from Rotterdam on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's DOPPELGANGER, an odd horror/suspense/screwball comedy sounding film from the director of KAIRO and CURE, both of which I liked quite a bit. Especially KAIRO. It's also nice to get a slight bit of info about Kiyoshi's next film. Here ya go...
Hi Harry,
Never thought I'd actually submit a review to www.aintitcool.com, because however much I'm a real movie lover, I'm not a very good writer (and certainly not in English). But considering that I've seen a film at the Rotterdam filmfestival that hasn't been mentioned yet on your site (and isn't even listed at www.imdb.com for that matter) I thought I'd give it a try!
That film is Kiyoshi Kurasawa's "Doppelganger", a film that he apparently managed to creak out after completing "Bright Future" last year (which I didn’t manage to see at the festival).The story centres around Michio Hayasaki, a designer who’s working on a revolutionary new robot chair for paralysed people, who can completely control the chair (including two arms that are attached to the chair) through their thought-processes. Then one night he sights his “double”. At first he simply denies him, thinking his mind is playing tricks on him because of his busy work schedule (and the problems he has at his work). But the double just doesn’t want to be ignored and starts interfering with Hayasaki’s life. Slowly turning it upside down, him being a more assertive version of the “original / real” Hayasaki. The story then takes quite a number of quite unexpected turns that I don’t want to spoil, ending in a screwball-comedy kind of way (including a nice Indiana Jones homage featuring a character being chased by a large disco-mirrorball. The difference between the boulder in Indiana Jones and the mirrorball was a good indication about the budgets in Hollywood as opposed to Japan quipped Kurasawa in his Q&A after the movie)! As you can perhaps already guess from my story description it’s quite a weird movie, starting off in that typical dark Japanese horror-style (like in his “Kairo”), but then taking a number of abrupt changes in tone: drama, love story, comedy, social commentary. Viewers who want it clear what type of “genre” a movie is and/or expect another “Kairo” or “Cure”, will find this very frustrating, and while it’s easy to say the movie is “all over the place”, I kind of like the freedom (like a musical improvisation sometimes) it exhibits. Visually it’s also quite intriguing, extensively using split-screen in different ways when the double is involved.
Mr. Kurasawa was also present for an introduction and Q&A after the screening. He said he got the idea for the movie, because he always liked his characters in his movies to have contradictory sides to them and this time wanted to take that a step further and just have one actor (one of his regulars:Yakusho Koji) play these sides of the same character as two physical persons. He thought that would make it less confusing for the audience, than having one person exhibiting contradictory behaviour (at which he himself wisely had a laugh). He also talked about DV (digital video) on which he shot his last three films (“Kairo”, “Bright future” and “Doppelganger”) which he said gave him a lot of freedom because he could work with very small budgets (“Doppelganger cost around 1 million US dollars he said, a budget that is quite standard in Japan for low budget films). And I must say the film looked quite good and I hadn’t noticed it was shot on DV until he said so.
Asked what his next project was, he said he just completed a screenplay for a “tragic, romantic horror movie”, but that he hoped that “if, after filming it will have turned out to be comedy after all, I hope people will not hold it against me and laugh!”. All in all it was really nice to have seen & heard mr. Kurasawa, who seemed like a really nice friendly guy and is certainly someone who will continue to make interesting, original movies. I cannot wait for his romantic horror movie, and he seems to be on a roll so we probably will not have to wait long to see it….
Harry, if you use this review you can call me max 404
