STREAMING CINEMA
Surprisingly Little Mystery About Uzbekistan
Kiyoshi Kurosawa doesn’t play to his strengths in “To the Ends of the Earth”
Atsuko Maeda in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “To the Ends of the Earth.”
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Even when depicting ordinary
Japanese life, as in
“Tokyo Sonata,” Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s fi lms feel mysterious.
He’s best known in the US
for two horror fi lms, 1997’s “Cure”
and 2001’s “Pulse.” In the fi rst, a
man recognizes the gaping alienation
of Japanese society so well
that he can hypnotize anyone into
committing murder for him. In the
second, ghosts launch themselves
off the Internet and take over the
world, leading to an apocalyptic
conclusion.
The director has been having
a bit of a revival in the US lately:
Metrograph streams his killer jellyfi
sh fi lm “Bright Future” from
December 4 to 10, and the streaming
service MUBI showed an entire
series of his fi lms in November. His
second most recent fi lm, “To the
Ends of the Earth” from last year,
isn’t genre fare, but it retains his
customary mood of taking place
in a demon-haunted world, to lift a
phrase from a Carl Sagan book.
The fi rst half of this fi lm starts
off quite strong. Kurosawa shows
us Yoko’s (Atsuko Maeda) position
in the public eye from the very fi rst
scene, where we observe her watching
her apply lipstick in the mirror.
The fi lm doesn’t sexually objectify
Yoko, but she’s almost always at
the center of its widescreen, Band-
Aid-shaped frames. Even when
she’s off work as a TV travel show
host, she’s acutely aware that she’s
on public inspection. (Although
this is the third time Maeda and
Kurosawa have worked together,
her background as a pop singer fi ts
this role.)
In Uzbekistan, she gets a ride
to a lake where she’s fi lming her
show. The program’s unpleasant
behind-the-scenes reality is concealed
from viewers, as she puts
on a false façade of happy life as
a tourist. For instance, she fi nds
an Uzbek rice dish inedible but
praises it on-air and is twice forced
to go on an amusement park ride
that works more like a leftover KGB
torture device. She tries to free the
goat Okku, but he’s captured again
by the show’s crew after his “liberation”
from his owner is fi lmed
by them.
Yoko does not speak Uzbek,
spending much of her free time
roaming around the country without
fully understanding what’s
going on around her. The fi lm is
KIMSTIM
devoted to her subjectivity, refusing
to subtitle any language other
than Japanese. The bilingual
Temur (Adiz Rajabov), who works
as an interpreter on the show, is
the only Uzbek she can connect
with directly. At fi rst, this distance
feels faintly xenophobic, especially
in a scene where a scared Yoko
runs through the street as hustling
Uzbeks approach her. But the
fears expressed have more to do
with just being in unfamiliar surroundings.
At their weakest, Kurosawa’s
fi lms can spend two hours spinning
around empty portent. He’s
typically at his best making genre
work, because the dictates of horror
or sci-fi force him to express
a vague discomfort as something
more concrete. Only a few years
into the start of the Internet’s
popularity, he came up with an
extremely resonant metaphor for
the way it has left us more isolated,
benefi ting from its opaque nature
at a time when other horror fi lms
inspired by online life moralized
about murder and torture being
live-streamed.
But Kurosawa’s fi lms are capable
of simultaneously telling too much
and too little. Even “Pulse” could
do without the scene in which college
students talk about a computer
program simulating the pushand
pull of human attraction. In
“To the Ends of the Earth” Okku
symbolizes Yoko’s desire for freedom
so blatantly that her glimpse
of him running wild near the fi lm’s
end might induce groaning.
This fi lm has frequently been likened
to a horror movie, and I suppose
it expresses a sense of terror
without falling into the genre. For
a male director, Kurosawa has a
good feel for the faint menace that
everyday crowds hold for women;
although no overt threat is communicated
and nothing actually
happens between them, he shows
Yoko picking up her pace when
she walks past a group of men in a
parking garage.
The fi lm was made in close cooperation
with Uzbekistan’s tourist
board, and its original concept was
given to the production company
Loaded Films as an offi cial commemoration
of 25 years of relations
between Japan and Uzbekistan.
So its avoidance of the country’s
checkered human rights record is
not surprising. But some kind of
critique still comes across when
Yoko gets chased by cops and arrested
merely for taking photos of
something they might fi nd illegal.
In the end, there’s little mystery
in “To the Ends of the Earth,”
while Kurosawa’s best fi lms overfl
ow with it. The fears plaguing
Yoko are explained, and her new
mood of liberation is symbolized by
her performance of a treacly song
on top of a mountain. We’re closer
to “The Sound of Music” than
“Cure” or “Pulse.” “To the Ends of
the Earth” tries too hard to be a
profound character study, and the
strain shows, while the over-extended
length and reliance on vibe
also become a drag. It ends up as
less than meets the eye.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH |
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | In
Japanese with English subtitles |
KimStim | Starts streaming through
Metrograph on Dec. 11 | metrograph.
com
December 3- December 16, 2 16 020 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
