On the evidence of "The Day Toshi Was Born" director Hikaru Yoshikawa owes a debt of gratitude to Francois Truffaut, and especially 1959's "400 Blows," which clearly inspired this contemporary take on youthful disillusionment. A crossbow at the crossroads
HIFF FACTS
By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comLike Antoine Doinel, Yoshikawa's eponymous hero is a young lad filled with anger and a desire for freedom, an impressionable child with a gift for mischief. But unlike his French counterpart, whose rebellions now seem quaint, Toshi (Kazuta Ota) is a 21st century miscreant given to threatening his parents and caching weapons (e.g., a crossbow).
The result is a bleak tale of adolescent angst set against the flat, airless backdrop of a nondescript Japanese suburb. Toshi's father, whose one brief shining moment occurred years ago during his leftist student days, is now a broken man, an alcoholic electrician with a gardening hobby. ("It's a protest against capitalism," Toshi wryly observes.) The boy's mother, a docile nonentity, seems to exist solely as an object of spousal abuse for her husband, the latter beating her senseless several times during this brief, 55-minute film. Completing this fractured nuclear family is Toshi's brother Masaru, an uncombed drifter whose dialogue mainly serves to explain his absence from school.
"The Day Toshi Was Born"
Screens at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, 900 S. Beretania St.
To the film's credit, director Yoshikawa offers us a wholly unsentimental portrait of youth, one that offers many explanations for Yoshi's disaffection without settling on any of them. When Yoshi and his troubled young friend Saito escape to the rooftop of their school building merely for the purpose of seeing the sky, the film takes on a darkly poetic quality. And the climactic scene on a deserted beach (which is, incidentally, the setting of the final scene of "400 Blows") is as devastating and heart-wrenching an ending as Truffaut's was mysterious and disturbing.
But "Toshi" is also crudely impetuous at times, the filmmaker sometimes buying into his characters' penchant for melodramatic self-expression. (Each time that crossbow is pointed at someone, the movie's cringe factor rises exponentially.) That's to be expected from a student film (both "Toshi" and "Home," which will be screened the same night, were hatched at the Japan Academy of Moving Images) and at the very least reflects a passion for the art form that is entirely commendable.
Even more impressive, however, is the way the younger generation of Japanese filmmakers is unflinchingly depicting its country's many problems. The overwhelming sense one gets, from "Toshi" and other films of the festival, is of a country badly in need of spiritual renewal. Whatever the cause of its malaise, this is a Japan ripe for cultural evolution. And it's thanks to the country's fledgling artists -- as opposed to the American media and its penchant for images of relative tranquility -- that these portraits of a country on the brink have come to light.
Click for online
calendars and events.
