 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Product Detail |
 |
|
Audio Format: DD 2.0
Video Format: Widescreen 1.66:1 (Anamorpihc)
Languages: Japanese
Subtitles: English
Region Code: ALL
Year Made: 2005
Running Time: 82
Release Date: 09/23/2008
Please note: PRE-ORDER
This title will be released on Sep. 23, 2008, and you may order it now.
As soon as we receive this title in stock, we will ship your order in timely manner.
The actual release date and information of this title may change without notice.
If your order includes otherIn Stock items, all relevant items will be shipped to you together with your pre-order item when it arrives.
Your credit card will be charged at the date of order placed to comfirm the purchase
Japan can be a pretty harmonious place, unless you're out of tune by appearance, personality or the model of cell phone you bring to school. Then you start to learn the meaning of the large Japanese vocabulary for exclusion, including ijime (usually translated as "bullying") and murahachibu (social ostracism -- literally, "cast out of the village"). Foreigners often encounter at least mild forms of this -- the seat beside you that stays empty on a crowded train, the neighbor who never returns your greeting -- but it is Japanese themselves who usually bear the full brunt, as Japanese filmmakers have noted again and again.
They often portray schools, especially, as snake pits of merciless bullying, including viciously creative varieties that could give CIA interrogators pointers. Exaggeration for dramatic effect? Certainly, but in most of these films, the perpetrators are finally brought up short. Lives may be shattered or lost, but justice prevails.
Masahiro Kobayashi offers no such assurance in "Bashing," a sparely told, emotionally walloping film suggested by the real-life experiences of a Japanese woman who was on a self-styled volunteer mission in Iraq when she was captured by insurgents, held hostage and finally released unharmed. Back home, she was widely criticized by the media and public for going to Iraq in the first place, as well as for causing trouble for her rescuers and embarrassment for the nation.
Screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, "Bashing" represents a breakthrough for Kobayashi, who also won invitations to Cannes for "Kaizokuban -- Bootleg Film (Bootleg Film)" in 1998, "Koroshi (Film Noir)" in 2002, and "Aruku, Hito (Man Walking on Snow)" in 2001. A veteran scriptwriter with nearly 500 TV credits, Kobayashi has had a harder time establishing himself as a major director here than in France. Critics were not always kind to his -- at times -- labored attempts to channel his beloved French auteurs, while audiences mostly stayed away. "Bashing," however, has enjoyed what, for a Kobayashi film, is a flood of media attention, and is still drawing crowds a month after its opening at Image Forum in Shibuya.
It deserves this attention not so much for the originality of its stripped-down aesthetic -- Kobayashi is once again channeling, this time the Dardennes brothers ("L'Enfant," "Rosetta") -- as its unsparing look at what might be called the Japanese way of ostracism, carried to its ultimate extreme.
His heroine, Yuko (Fusako Urabe), is first seen after she has returned from her ordeal to her home in a bleak industrial town on the coast somewhere in Hokkaido. When she arrives for work as a hotel maid, none of her colleagues acknowledge her greeting and she works her shift in total silence. Then her boss (Teruyuki Kagawa) tells her she's been fired. She's "disturbing the atmosphere of the workplace," he says.
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Be the first to write a review. |
|
| No customer review found. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | |