Swing and a Miss
No doubt, Kore-eda’s a great filmmaker – but he’s not perfect.
MOnster
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda • Writer: Yuji Sakamoto
Starring: Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Mitsuki Takahata, Shido Nakamura, Yuko Tanaka
Japan • 2hrs 5mins
Opens Hong Kong June 22 • IIA
Grade: B-
At this point in time you can’t say anything negative about Hirokazu Kore-eda. To suggest he’s able to flub a film is blasphemy. He’s not alone; a bunch of filmmakers have been saddled with the crown of perfection. Martin Scorsese: Bravo, bravo. Genius! Yeah, except for the slogs that were Silence and The Irishman. Wong Kar-wai: Mwah, chef’s kiss. Influential innovator. Sure, except for thinking no one would notice the muddle of The Grandmaster and its dumbass, hilariously endless train departure. Which brings us to Kore-eda, admittedly an inspiration for dozens of filmmakers around the world and one of contemporary cinema’s most humanistic storytellers. Except for Monster | 怪物, a repetitive and aimless drama about too much and not enough, with a Marvel/DC-sized third act problem. Sorry for comparing apples to oranges, but few others drop the ball so consistently coming into the home stretch.
Perhaps significantly, Monster represents the first time Kore-eda’s directed a film he didn’t write. Yuji Sakamoto’s screenplay won a prize at Cannes (whose prizes now are almost as meaningless as Oscars) takes a Rashomon-esque three act examination of truth and perspective, and turns it into a bloated melodrama that loses focus, and so loses its emotional grounding. By the time we get the “truth” of what happened between an abusive elementary school teacher, Michitoshi Hori (Eita Nagayama), and students Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa) and Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi) – one of who might be bullying the other – Sakamoto and Kore-eda have taken a turn for Couldn’t Care Less Land and neutered their plot and any point lurking inside it. This is not Kore-eda at his best.
Not the kind of ambiguity we need
Monster starts strong. Single mom Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando, the much, much better Shoplifters and entirely wasted here) begins a campaign to find out just what the hell is going on with her son, Minato, who’s suddenly started acting up and jumping out of moving cars and such. The story starts one evening with the two watching firefighters battle a four-alarm blaze in the distance. There’s a hostess bar in the burning building, which Hori is rumoured to be a regular at. Saori winds up fighting the school bureaucracy, including grieving but totally inept principal Makiko Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), to get some kind of response for Minato’s various wounds. Then a typhoon hits and ends the first interpretation of the story.
The second segment, like any good Rashomon rip-off, tells essentially the same story, this time from Hori’s point of view, filling in blanks and clarifying the sequence of events. It also tells us more about Hoshikawa (Hiiragi is the standout performer here), who’s own wounds may or may not come from Minato, but from his own drunk of a dad, Kiyotaka (Shido Nakamura). Monster’s problems really start in Act 3, which not only needlessly rehashes stuff we already know but does jack shit with the threads it’s teased out – is there a sympathetic eye in here for stigmatised single parents in Japan? Are the kids dealing with emergent sexualities they can’t fathom? Is Hoshikawa a psychopath? Is this the way Japanese schools handle problematic teachers? – but finds time for a fourth POV fakeout. Far be it from me to demand nice, tidily wrapped resolutions in my films, but Monster is so weightless, so meaningless, the final impression is one of frustration rather than revelation or empathy.
On more than one occasion, someone asks who the monster is, or accuses somebody else of being a monster. Existential queries only work when you lead into them with something to say about education, sexuality, boyhood friendship, how we let our personal circumstances cloud our judgement or guide our actions, or simply how we all perceive a given moment differently. Sakamoto lets the final act – which should mos def not be longer yet somehow emptier than the first two – get away from him, and leans into his more sentimental and melodramatic Crying Out Love in the Center of the World instincts for the worse. Kore-eda’s sunny images are very often misleading, alarmingly so, making them ripe with nuance, sorrow or fury. This time they just feel pedestrian, even though they were captured by Ryuto Kondo, and are far from the graceful, intimate compositions of Shoplifters. The real kick in the teeth, though, is that this is composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last film; an ignominious capper to a stellar career. Or a forgettable one. That actually might be worse. — DEK