classic and romantic, realistic and tragic

With a recurring sight of an industrial chimney amidst a coastal town, Michihito Fujii's movie about yakuza and family, aired first in 2020 in Taipei, offers us a nice view on Japanese society: both romanticized and realistic, with not-so-good characters but good technique.


Starting concretely after an introductory first time period of more than 20 minutes of screen time (!), the movie offers a quite amusing, if not weird contrast for depicting yakuza. While they are pretty much shown as heroes in the second time period of the movie, carefree and admired by the population, they become total outcasts in the third time period. This evolution from a romanticized view to a realistic one feels a bit too astounding: I'd guess that Fujii wanted first to show the classic romantic view on yakuza in said second period to enter into the usual trope of the genre, before moving on to the newer realistic approach of its third phase — an understandable choice, that could have been more well performed nonetheless.

That being said, it is really for that third period that the movie shines. Recently, due to a series of laws passed in the 2010s, the yakuza world has been waning in Japan. Despite this, the world of art and entertainment still prefers to continue showing us badass and cool yakuzas. The view captured here by Fujii is not only realistic: it is also real at all. Today, being a yakuza is not fun, nor enjoyable, nor even a concretely possible life to lead: as one would stop being one, one would face strong ostracism for a rough 5 years, to the extent of losing one's friends, peers and even family, while struggling for even getting a cellphone. The Japanese society, highly cohesive, doesn't play around when it comes to dealing with outcasts. For that point, I found that the movie used very neatly the fact it was changing time periods: thus for the last one in 2019 that showcased the appearance of social networks and their astounding speed and strength for spreading quickly a small piece of information like a picture.

For that matter, the movie also shows some other interesting societal aspects. The most obvious is how the police is corrupted to the core and tied with the yakuza and their affairs: it's not by chance that the yakuza were so deeply rooted in Japanese society before. More interestingly, the movie asks the real question of how to deal with former criminals after they have served their prison sentence and their reintegration into society.

As its title shows by mentioning the word twice in Japanese and in English, the movie especially insists on the theme of family: its main character hasn't gotten the opportunity to grow within one, and has been longing for it — even if that were to be yakuzas, even if it would mean losing them quickly. As such, the movie shows that one can long for loved ones, be them related by blood or not, and that at all costs.

Sadly, Fujii's characters aren't so well written, nor is their development. Because of this, we don't clearly understand how Yuka fell in love with Kenji, nor how far Shibasaki played a father figure for Kenji. This lack of character development is a pity, because it would have elevated the movie a lot. Next to that though, Fujii tells his narration through clues and not just simple lines of text (like for Kenji's dad's fate), which is quite pleasant.

Otherwise, the movie uses interesting techniques throughout, most notably for the camera and the image. The camera's motion differs depending on the scene: it can as much shake (maybe too much though), reflecting Kenji's mind wandering, or being steady when it wants to engraves a scene. There was a very nice scene where the camera, literally a passenger in a car, was accompanying the viewer all along. As for the image, its overall aspect changes depending on the period, gradually becoming forlorn, darker in color and light as we move further in time.


Despite its flaws, I personally loved this movie, and would recommend it for its portrayal both romantic and realistic of yakuza, and of Japanese society as a whole. If it can fail to grasp the viewer's interest in its first segment, the tragical turn it takes in the second segment is striking and definitely worth watching.

Citeste mai mult