Saturday, April 23 04 PM
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017
Based on a non-musical Korean film—The Quiet Family by another genre-mixing filmmaker, Jae Woon Kim—Takashi Miike uses the increasing absurdity of this comedy-horror-musical to explore the state of the Japanese family after the collapse of the economic boom that underpinned the popular song film. The film’s claymation opening sequence and bleak narrative of a downsized salaryman opening a B&B in the country presents contemporary life as a hopeless cycle of exploitation, but the performance of the film’s lo-fi musical numbers by a cast that includes Kenji Sawada, star of several “group sounds” musical films in the 1960s, highlights a nostalgia for intimacy and optimism.
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