By Bryan Hartzheim

Waddya know -- a film that our Japanese correspondent Bryan Hartzheim actually liked. Or, at least, kinda liked. In the latest Letter from Japan, he grudgingly recommends Sabu's Dead Run.

Difficult and intelligent

I suppose that old adage, “You can never go home again,” is what director and screenwriter Sabu had in mind for Shisso, his adaptation of novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu's meditation on the nature of crime and religion in both small and large towns amidst the pain of adolescence. Sabu is one of those indie talents I grouped together in this space a few months back as cause for hope in the detritus of declining studio debris. The many passionate readers of us here at APA are likely to have heard of the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jun Ichikawa, and Shunji Iwai, but Sabu, whose real name is Hiroyuki Tanaka, deserves to be labeled alongside these other talents.

Sabu's career started in acting when he debuted in satirist Yoshimitsu Morita's Sorobankazu. He occasionally makes the brief cameo in films by his fellow indie brethren (I believe he was in Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer a little while back), but for the most part, since the plaudits that adorned him following his first feature, D.A.N.G.A.N. Runner ("Non Stop" in the states), Sabu has turned his focus mostly to his directing. Shisso or “Dead Run,” is his ninth feature and, at a little over two hours, is also his longest.

One has every right to lament what seems to be the execution of the editor in current bloated cinema.  That's partly one very simple reason why I like many of Sabu's films -- he keeps things brief and moving, as if he knew that he doesn't always have the most profound things to say. Most of his oeuvre clocks in under 100 minutes, a running time Lubitsch and others of his auteur generation had been said to remark that not a minute over which was necessary. In Sabu's films, there is no need to petrify our eyes and brains. The director and D.P. don't hold hands in unity shooting a man interminably whittling away at a piece of wood.

Still, I had my reservations about the length. Since I have not read the novel from which “Dead Run” is based off of, the story of the film can basically be described as follows: Shuuji lives in a small resort town somewhere in the Chiba prefecture, a couple hours or so out of Tokyo. Younger brother to a high-achieving class president, Shuuji is one of those typical kids who is shy and unconfident and otherwise clichéd and unremarkable in adolescent film history. Early on, however, he befriends a smalltime yakuza and his girlfriend, but shortly after, this yakuza is fished out of a shallow river Ophelia-style, leaving his girlfriend to cling on to more powerful and worthy criminals. 

Fast forward a few years and Shuuji is now in junior high school, his brother a high school standout heading toward university success. Into the town moves a church, accompanied by a priest with a notorious past and a girl, Eri, the same age as Shuuji who finds comfort in the church after the death of both of her parents. Shuuji, attracted to something in Eri, begins to attend and find interest in the church as well. No sooner does he do so when his brother is found to have cheated on a test, succinctly destroying his chances of easy success and recognition for his family. The downward spiral of Shuuji's own life, alongside his family's, is swift and brutal. His brother is apparently driven to random acts of property destruction, and his mother and father are severely castigated by the community. In a matter of cinematic moments, Shuuji's entire family -- his brother in prison and his parents in cowardice -- is gone without a goodbye, leaving our protagonist alone at the mercy of bullies. Even Eri graduates and leaves for Tokyo.  It is at this point the audience is reminded that Shisso -- the film's Japanese title -- literally means to “run away and disappear without a trace.” Sensing there is nothing left for him in his town, Shuuji embarks on a journey to Tokyo to find some sort of purpose for himself. There he finds his old yakuza girlfriend, an incipient prostitute and even Eri before attempting to head back home.

One can find a thread connecting “Dead Run” with Sabu's other films. His characters run, usually after some newfound purpose, and usually after walking through a series of sufferings, falls and rises, and general heavy philosophical contemplation. In “The Blessing Bell,” a mildly amusing absurdist minimalism, the newly unemployed protagonist encounters a series of human sufferings, misfortunes, and the occasional tragedy before realizing something in a climatic epiphany. It is here he runs home at full speed to the warmth of his family's hearth. Sabu might have fashioned “Dead Run” as the antithesis to that singular conclusion, that we might not all have somewhere to return to after the harsh realities of modern alienation.

Like his other films, Sabu keeps things moving here as well.  He's precise with narrative; his characters are introduced at precisely the right moment; ancillary details are included only to flesh out segments of character which are deemed necessary for the story. He's also controlled in his sparse use of an excellent moody score. These are but a few examples of the director's keen intelligence, which fortunately influences many of the themes of the film as well. 

“Dead Run” is loaded with some important and difficult ideas. To touch on one I especially liked, the film deals with among many characters a man who has encountered sin and redemption through religion. Unlike the easy cheap shots leveled at Christianity in many American films like, say, Million Dollar Baby, Sabu doesn't keep things so conversely didactic. Without unduly spoiling things, Shuuji cannot find his own comfort in the church, and Sabu has the audacity to suggest this is a tragic thing. For people who have lost loved ones or a moral sense of grounding, the film understands religion can not only be a source of comfort but also provide a powerful lens of guidance. This message is also not preachy because the film does not argue for it; it simply presents the idea, and we are left to contemplate that not every trauma can lead to the same path. The priest found solace in the church; Shuuji didn't -- it simply wasn't for him.  Strangely, I think Sabu's idea of Christianity is really quite rudimentary (there is, solely, a Cain and Abel parable scantly introduced between Shuuji and his brother) but his intellect dictates that his characters rise above the usual cynical bromides.

There are other ideas here -- notably the same relationship between civilians and criminals that fuels the continuing crime which Itami Juuzo satirized several years back -- and many of them are equally as difficult. And yet for all of this peerless construction and insight, the film is one of Sabu's most leaden, lacking his usual cinematic vitality. This, I suspect, is due to the film filtering its story through the largely inarticulate adolescence of Shuuji. Cast as naïve, morose, and alone, Shuuji is Benjamin Braddock in modern Japan. Events spiral out of control, with heavy philosophical import, and yet our hero can only respond in a sort of Prozac-induced daze, as if the only response to shock is paralysis. By focusing strictly on Shuuji, the film's other characters tend to drift toward symbolic surface portraits. The brother, for example, an otherwise intelligent though self-absorbed overachiever, goes insane, and his descent is assumed to be completely logical, as is the parents' swift departure. These are potentially terribly dramatic moments which the film is not willing to carefully chronicle through Shuuji's eyes. His lack of judgment and verbal expression is natural considering his age, but this flaw keeps the film's judgment from reaching a more complex conclusion as well. Indeed, there are many complicated moments in the film that have little impact on a very simple conclusion, some very skillfully assembled parts not coming together for as satisfying a whole. 

Infecting the entire mood of the piece is Shuuji's somber, indeed, dead attitude -- symbolically effective, I suppose, in its verisimilitude, but finally too damn serious for its own good. I was reminded, while watching this, of Holden Caulfield's trek back home from his dismissal from prep school in The Catcher in the Rye. “Dead Run” has all of the fantastic incident and revelatory moments of Salinger's classic, but none of the terrific dry wit tempered by youthful skepticism. Holden is about the same age, but his humor livens up his occasional lapses into sentimentality. “Dead Run” is humorless and fails to see a trace of irony in a single one of its proceedings, and this is especially unfortunate considering Sabu's previous body of work is quite funny.  His 1999 “Monday” opens with a hilarious parody of one of those cut-the-red-or-yellow-wire segments from a bomb movie, except the bomb in “Monday” is a pacemaker in a deceased young man. It's a terrific scene, and the sense of humor that created it would have been welcome here.

In the film's final analysis, however, there is too much to recommend in “Dead Run” to not warrant a viewing. The thought it provokes is far too rewarding, as is the excellent ensemble acting that I have not hitherto mentioned. Yuya Tegoshi, who plays Shuuji, is no Yuya Yagira -- the young man who won deserved recognition for his amazing performance as Akira in “Nobody Knows” -- but I suspect his effort was largely sculpted by the director. A different alumna from “Nobody Knows,” Hanae Kan -- who played Akira's girlfriend -- gives a serious performance here, as well.  Etsushi Toyokawa as a priest is quite good here, and all the more so because he was also in the “The Great Blackout Coming,” -- he's much better here than he was as one of those irritating talking heads that I wanted to chop off. The best acting in the piece, though, goes to Miki Nakatani's sole variety in emotion and a believable Osaka accent as the yakuza hanger-on, and Ren Osugi, for his brief but truly menacing yakuza portrayal.

Lastly, a shout-out to the film's D.P. Masao Nakabori, who shoots this entire thing sharply and focused; no washed-out photography here, folks. Nakabori is one of the most underrated in the business, someone who's had a long career dating back to the '70s but relatively few films. He shoots “Dead Run” with a mix of visual cues; skies creeping past stretched-out vistas; myriad reflections from mirrors and bodies of water; fires blazing over houses. In other words, he gets all the realistic elements here, and he makes them aesthetically pleasing. I checked IMDB for his other credits, and it's no surprise that he filmed Hirokazu Kore-eda's exquisite beauty Maboroshi. Nakabori, like Sabu, deserves to be mentioned alongside some of the other cinematographers of his generation for that achievement alone.

Published: Thursday, January 26, 2006