Who Wants Ice Cream?
Designer-turned-director Tetsuya Chihara is trying to bring creativity back to Japanese filmmaking.
Tetsuya Chihara
Tetsuya Chihara might be the Tom Ford of Japan. True, he’s not a fashion designer, but he does come from a design background, chiefly as founder of the Tokyo-based graphic design studio Lemon Life, notable for its creative branding, CD cover art, arts and culture advertising and beyond. Kyoto-born Chihara’s sitting in the café outside the cinema that’s about to screen his feature debut, Ice Cream Fever, as part of the line-up of the 35th Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Unsurprisingly cool dressed entirely in black and sporting hip, oversized glasses and a neo-retro fedora, Chihara flushes and grins a tiny bit at the Ford comparison, but is cagey when it comes to revealing whether or not he’s chuffed at the relative success of his first film. He will admit it was almost inevitable.
“Directing a film has actually been a dream from when I was a child. The more I knew about movies and the industry as I grew up the more interest I had. And of course there are the design elements in filmmaking too,” he begins. “I was really fascinated by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets – the opening credits and the titles, and the design elements within it. I just fell in love with that. Basically the reason I became a designer is because of movies,” he adds with a laugh. So after a decade of graphics, Chihara went back to his first love. Luckily he had a strong collaborator for his inaugural foray into cinema. During his career in design, he’d managed to strike up a professional and friendly relationship with Akutagawa and Tanizaki Prize-winning author Mieko Kawakami – who famously took Haruki Murakami to task for his representations of women and female sexuality in Haruki Murakami: A Long, Long Interview. The result was Ice Cream Fever.
Based on her short story and adapted by Tadashi Shimizu, the action unfolds in a little corner of Shibuya, a gentle slice-of-life dramedy about four young women’s interlocking worlds. There’s Natsumi (Riho Yoshioka) an ad exec (!) who unwinds from the rat race by working at the Million Ice Cream shop; regular customer Saho (Serena Motola), a morose author with a bad case of writer’s block who Natsumi takes a romantic interest in; Yu (Marika Matsumoto) a successful OL with a past whose niece (Kotona Minami) crashes her carefully ordered life; and Natsumi’s parlour co-worker Takako (Utaha, from Wednesday Campanella, which happens to be doing a gig in Hong Kong in October) the most aimless and untethered of the bunch. Ice Cream Fever makes no grand statements about the nature of the universe, but it’s an undeniably resonant acknowledgement and celebration of the ordinary. Most of us know – or are – these women on some level, and a Japanese film that doesn’t demand its women be deer-caught-in-the-headlights tomato cans is a welcome change of pace.
“We wanted to make a film where female identity really stood out, right ’til the end of the movie. Top to bottom, beginning to end. So many films start that way and give way to the male characters. There are no men in Ice Cream Fever,” Chihara states, quite proudly, though he’s wrong. There is one guy: a cheating husband (though the central romance was hetero in the book) with no dialogue. The film’s singular focus on Natsumi, Saho, Yu and Takako gives it a Happy Hour feel, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s five-hour deep dive into the lives of four middle class Tokyo women. The difference is Ice Cream Fever has a vivid pop mentality, with a great deal of joy bubbling beneath its colourful surface.
Actually, maybe it makes him Japan’s Pedro Almodóvar.
Which is not to suggest Chihara is aping Hamaguchi or Almodóvar, or personal influences Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson. Nonetheless Ice Cream Fever is formally, for lack of a better word, wacky, and apes those giants in the way they DGAF about the rules. “I do have a lot of films and filmmakers that I love, but the more I tried to put what they did to their films in my film the worse it went. I just ended up copying them, and it was no fun at all.” After a few reels, okay gigabytes, of looking outward Chihara started listening to his instincts and once he did things went much smoother. He plays with speed, colour, framing and composition, time, score and every other convention he could think of in exploring his characters and moving them around Shibuya. “When I was designing the poster, it felt like what I do with design normally. I put that technique back to my filmmaking.”
Part of Chihara’s technique mirrors the one that’s made his design such a hit. The phrase “Ceci n’est pas un film” – this is not a film – screams across the screen near the beginning of Ice Cream Fever, a similar sentiment to the one that guides Lemon Life. “Once you put a label on something, you can only make that thing. That line is to remind me to create something more than just a film, to inspire myself with new steps and to come up with new things.” New, of course, being something Chihara thinks the film industry in Japan desperately needs. “There's, like, a production committee in Japan,” he scoffs. Like Sho Miyake, he worries that the market is driving the industry, and if the market likes mushy romance that’s what’s going to get made. And the problem extends to other media. “The same story happens again and again, because the money generates from within Japan itself. It’s such an island country, and not really accepting of foreign views and stories. If it doesn’t expand its vision, it’s only going to repeat.”
That expanding vision includes greater willingness to tackle tricky subjects and embrace all the elements that go into creating modern Japan. Chihara’s primary goal with Ice Cream Fever was painting a portrait of the world around him. Not necessarily a film about war, rape and fraud, but about that ordinariness – something that acknowledges LGBTQ people. In some parts of the world, critics would be quick to pounce on someone outside the community writing LGBTQ characters, but for Chihara the point is moot. It’s not what the film was about.
“It’s natural to have gay people among these stories because they are a natural part of the world. So I didn’t worry about not be ‘allowed’ to create gay characters or women. This movie is about people living in Shibuya. In Japan, obviously people are still really slow to change, and are very traditional and not really open to talking about gender issues and LGBTQ issues, so on the creative side it’s not something I worried about.”
He’s not going to worry about it for his next film either, which will probably be another collaboration with Kawakami; they’re currently throwing around ideas that can be built from another of her novels or stories. Chihara isn’t confirming or denying it, but he’s on the cusp of building a Scorsese-esque crew of go-to actors and technical crew for the future. He’s quick to admit he didn’t really have a clue about the process when he stepped on set his first day of production, and spent a lot of time asking questions and getting advice from whoever had the most experience. Veteran Yoshioka kind of took the lead, for which Chihara was thankful. “I’ve been in design for 10 years, and thanks to my co-workers and buddies I’ve always had a fun place to create my work, and to feel joy in working. I want to make films the same way. So maybe you’re going see a lot of familiar faces,” he finishes. Was Ice Cream Fever perfect? No (his words), but it is a breath of fresh air from a national cinema that’s very close to stagnating. “Before regretting what I could or should have done here I’d rather focus on progressing. I want to get to the next one because I’m sure I can do a lot of things much better.”
Where we were
Alimente @ Premiere Cinemas, Elements • Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2024
Hong Kong • September 13, 2024