The Ramen Girl (ラーメンガール, 2008)

 Lost in Translation: Traditional Chef Master?  It's a Mom & Pop ramen shop!

An amusing discussion took place on Facebook this week about whether or not The Ramen Girl (Robert Alan Ackerman, 2008) was a “surprisingly good film” or the exact opposite. As I did’t feel comfortable totally discrediting a film for which I had only seen the trailer, I decided to watch it  I had great hopes that it would be so bad that it was funny à la Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959). Sadly, it was not meant to be. The film is only mediocre, despite the best efforts of the Japanese cast to breathe some life into it.

 Confusing marketing.  Is this film about ramen or sex?

My short review of the film would be: “typical in-flight movie fare”, but for the edification of aspiring film directors and producers out there, here are some of my suggestions on what would have made this a much better film:

If you want a great feature film, don’t hire an American TV director. I confess that while I am unfamiliar with the work of Robert Alan Ackerman, in my judgment it is very rare for a longstanding American TV director to make the crossover successfully into cinematic fare. They pick up too many small screen habits (too much dialogue, not enough visual WOW factor).

Charlie & Gretchen “Cheers! Welcome to Japan”

Cast the English-speaking supporting cast with cinema actors (instead of theatre& TV actors). Watching the over-the-top performances of the English Toff (straight out a Merchant Ivory production circa 1985) and the faux Southern Belle Hostess did not make me laugh. Rather it drudged up long repressed memories of creepy eikaiwa teachers hitting on their unsuspecting students. Shudder. Did producer / casting director Yōko Narahashi (Babel) delegate the casting of foreigners to her former colleague on The Last Samurai Victoria Thomas (Blood Diamond)? Or was Welsh theatre actor and director Daniel Evans told to ham it up like Naoto Takenaka as Stresemann in Nodame Canabile? Which brings me to the most likely source of the comedy gone wrong: the direction. As it is doubtful that the direction was “lost in translation” between the English speaking director and his English speaking cast, we must thank whoever translated the direction to the Japanese cast for bringing a few moments of sunshine to an otherwise dull script.

 Don't let Kimiko Yo languish in the background!!!

Give Kimiko Yo more screen time and dialogue. She’s amazing in every movie (Dear Doctor, Departures) I’ve seen her in. ‘Nuff said.

Hire a Japanese composer. Carlo Siliotto’s music sounded as if it was inspired by old Hollywood notions of “Asian motifs” (à la Franz Waxman’s cheesy score for Sayonara). If you want Japanese flavour that is also sentimental, I recommend contemporary composers like Takahiro Kaneko (Megane, Pool), or Neko Saito (Toad’s Oil) or Fumikazu Sakamaki (Tomoyasu Murata’s animated films). . . the list of possibilities is endless really.

 If the film’s about Japanese food hire Nami Iijima as your food stylist. Her work on Naoko Ogigami’s films Megane (my review) and Kamome Shōkudo (my review) is beyond reproach. Ditto Chef of the South Pole (my review), which featured handmade ramen as a key plot point. I learned so much about the making of ramen while watching Makoto Sakai do it in Chef of the South Pole that I was shocked that The Ramen Girl seemed only to be about broth and toppings and not about the noodles themselves. If you want us to believe that your characters are having a Like Water For Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate, Alfonso Arau, 1992) moment, the film must be a feast for the eyes as well:

 Ramen done Nami Iijima style (Chef of the South Pole, 2009) 

- compare the expression of delight on the actor's face:

To the suffering endured by the actors in The Ramen Girl:

Oh, the agony! If only the director were Alfonso Arau!

 "I feel Brittany Murphy's sorrow at the direction this plot is taking!"
cries the lady with the pink scrunchie in her hair

Improve the on-screen rapport between the lead actress and her sensei. Toshiyuki Nishida (Sukiyaki Western Django, The Uchoten Hotel) nailed his performance in this film, but there was clearly a lack of connection between him and Brittany Murphy. Not only did they never have a proper discussion in Japanese, which seemed very rude of “Abby”, but when Brittany Murphy's blank stares during scenes when they were supposed to be connecting emotionally where bordering on disturbing. It should have looked more like this behind the scenes photograph:

Not this:

 Why can't you whine in Japanese?  

You've been working in my shop for a year now!

And finally: Tie the romantic plot line into the ramen plotline. The film would have been much more satisfying romantically speaking if she fell in love with the estranged son of the ramen shop couple instead of some random guy with no connection to ramen that she meets while out clubbing with her dodgy gaikokujin friends. No offense to Sohee Park (Tokyo!), the Zainichi actor who plays the love interest. He did an able job in English.

On a positive note, I can see the average Japanese audience reacting well to this movie - mainly because the Japanese acting is strong and the English acting may be lost in translation. Other good news:- the DVD is quite cheap in Japan:

 

The Ramen Girl [Priced-down Reissue]

Movie

Director

Robert Alan Ackerman

Screenwriter

Becca Topol

Cinematography

Yoshitaka Sakamoto

Cast

Abby • Brittany Murphy

Maezumi • Toshiyuki Nishida

Reiko Maezumi • Kimiko Yo

Toshi Iwamoto • Sohee Park

Grand Master • Tsutomu Yamazaki

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Sona, the Other Myself (ソナ、もうひとりの私, 2009)

Tonight at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, audiences will get a chance to see the North American debut of Yonghi Yang’s latest documentary Sona, the Other Myself. According to the Hot Docs website, her earlier film Dear Pyongyang “deeply moved audiences at Hot Docs three years ago, but eventually led to the filmmaker being banned from North Korea.”

Sona, the Other Myself (Sona, mou hitori no watashi, 2009), begins by introducing the audience to her family’s difficult history. Yang (ヤン・ヨンヒ) is a Zainichi (在日) filmmaker – a permanent resident of Japan of Korean ethnicity. In the 1970s, her father, a communist and leader of the pro-North Korea faction in Japan, sent his three sons to live in North Korea under a repatriation campaign. At the time, the boys were all extremely young at ages 14, 16, and 18. Yonghi Yang, being the only daughter and only 6 years of age at the time, remains in Osaka with her parents. 

In Dear Pyongyang, Yang dealt with the difficult question of why her father sent his young sons alone to North Korea and stayed himself in the relative comfort of Japan. The decision to divide the family leads to great heartache for all members of the family. This theme continues to haunt in Sona, the Other Myself, but this time the focus shifts to the female members of the family.

Sona, the director’s young niece, is the only daughter of her middle brother. In fact, she is the only granddaughter in the family – their little princess. During the question and answer period via Skype that followed the film’s screening at Nippon Connection, Yang revealed that she began collecting footage of Sona from the time of her birth, with the intention of putting together a video that could be played one day when the girl grew up and got married. Such a video is commonplace in the industrialized world, but unheard of in North Korea, where the people have limited access to video technology.

The footage that makes up the documentary was shot during Yang’s visits to her family over a 15 year period. The image quality and shaky camera have a home movie feel to them but now and then, Yang delights with her filmmakers’ eye for poetic framing. As the only girl in a family of boys, Yang identifies closely with Sona as the only granddaughter among many grandsons. This gave rise to the films self-reflexive title.

The film takes a dramatic turn early on when Sona’s mother dies due to an ectopic pregnancy. The scene of a brave 6 year old Sona praying at her mother’s grave is indescribably moving. The film captures Sona in other very intimate familial scenes: the dinner to celebrate her father’s remarriage, Yang buying Sona and her brothers ice cream (a rare treat) at the foreign currency store, Sona going to school and so on. The footage of Yang’s family in North Korea is counterbalanced by footage shot in Osaka, where Yang captures her mother lovingly preparing care parcels for her sons’ families and her father’s declining health.

I felt myself sharing the filmmaker’s concern for the well-being of her North Korean family, as well as a growing trepidation as the film went on about how the release of the film would impact young Sona’s life. As she grows older, we get glimpses of how aware Sona is of the camera and what it means politically for her to be filmed. Although she doesn’t express this directly, it becomes apparent that Sona knows what she can and cannot say when the camera is turned on. This culminates in a powerful sequence in which Sona gestures for her aunt to turn off the camera and Yang tells us via title cards the conversation that they had once the camera was turned off.

Sona, the Other Myself, is the most moving documentary that I have seen in a long time and I highly recommend it. It can be seen tonight at 9:30pm at the Cumberland 2 and on Friday at 1:30pm at the ROM Theatre. The DVD of Dear Pyongyang is unfortunately only available in Japanese and Korean. I do hope that a European or North American distributor picks it up soon.

Summary of Q&A via Skype with Yonghi Yang

What do her brothers do for a living in North Korea?

• her eldest brother works as a Japanese-Korean translator, her middle brother is an architect, her youngest brother works in trade
• her family in North Korea cannot make a comfortable living for themselves with their incomes and rely upon the black market and the generous parcels sent to them by her mother

How did her film Dear Pyonyang affect the family?

• Her mother can still visit North Korea and has gone back to visit the grave of her son
• Yonghi Yang is forbidden from entering the country
• her family in North Korea seems to be okay and they tell her that she should not worry about them
• she has to be careful about what she does, although she has their permission to do her work
• she was asked to write an apology letter to the North Korean government and she refused
• she can’t give up her work because Sona and her other North Korean family members would be disappointed in her if she gave up

The footage looks like home video footage, but at the same time there are moments that seem very deliberately framed. Did you take the footage intending to make a documentary?

• the early footage was shot on a High 8 camera. Sona was the first granddaughter and thus the family’s ‘first princess.’ Yang fell in love her from the very first visit.
• she wanted to make a short collection of video clips that could be shown at her wedding one day. That is something that most families in North Korea are unable to do for their children• she started filming, and after a time realized what an interesting story her family had
• filming without permission in North Korea is very difficult
• she told Sona’s father about the idea of making a documentary about Sona and he loved the idea. Sona’s father is the brother that she is closest to.
• she was worried that making the documentary about Sona would be too risky
• she talks about how brave her brother, Sona’s father, is
• she fears for Sona’s safety now that she’s releasing the documentary to the public

How long can this project go on? (ie making documentaries about her family)

• at the moment she and her family need a break
• for the past two years she has been shooting a totally different kind of documentary. She has been following the director of Wahaha Honpo (ワハハ本舗) around for two years shooting footage of him. This means that for two years she has been surrounded by Japanese comedians – a welcome change of pace for her.
• she is planning on writing scripts for fiction films
• she has written an essay in Japanese about her experiences in North Korea that she couldn’t show in video. She’s not sure if she could publish it in English.

Other DVDs produced by Wahaha Honpo:

Wahaha Honpo no World Baka Document

Variety

Wahaha Honpo Presents Onna Tantei Tarako Bannai - Nanatsu no Kao no Onna Daze

Theatrical Play

Daikon no Hanamichi - Wahaha Honpo

Theatrical Play (WAHAHA Honpo)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Bare Essence of Life (ウルトラミラクルラブストーリー, 2009)

 Bare Essence of Life (ウルトラミラクルラブストーリー/ Ultra Miracle Love Story, 2009) is set in the rural landscape of Aomori Prefecture, located on the northern tip of the island of Honshū. Aomori-born Ken’ichi Matsuyama (Detroit Metal City, L: Change the World) plays Yōjin, a 25-year old man who is trying to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps by running the family’s organic farm.

On top of the usual pressures of farming (insects, disease, weather), Yōjin struggles with a developmental disability or, as he describes it, his head is wired differently: “Not broken, but different.” He tries to improve his farming methods by listening to tape recorded instructions left behind by his grandfather, but his disability means that he is more quickly frustrated than the average farmer, and he is prone to acting out in ways considered socially unacceptable.

Yōjin lives alone with his grandmother, with his parents whereabouts being a complete mystery (are they dead? Did they abandon him with the grandmother because of his mental illness?). To try to give Yōjin some structure to his days, his grandmother has him plan out his days on a whiteboard. As the film progresses, this white board becomes a kind of diary for the thought processes that Yōjin goes through on a given day.

Yōjin’s life changes when Machiko (Kumiko Asō of Kaidan), a yochien (Kindergarten) teacher arrives from Tokyo. Yōjin falls in love with her at first sight, having never had a "special someone" before, but Machiko is resistant to his efforts to woo her. She has come to the countryside to recover from the death of her boyfriend Shimada (played by Arata of Twentieth Century Boys and Air Doll). Not only did he die in a horrific car accident, in which his head is rumoured to have been decapitated and never found again, but she found out that he was also unfaithful to her. Yōjin becomes convinced that he can cure himself by spraying himself regularly with pesticides, and thereby turn himself in to the man Machiko wants to have in her life. 

The film is occasionally humorous (such as the quack fortuneteller and her scrappy granddaughters who enjoy spreading gossip learned in fortunetelling sessions), but the pacing is slow and the film suddenly takes a turn midway through towards the surreal. The first clue that the film is moving into surreal territory is when Yōjin, with the help of a local boy, buries himself up to his chin in the cabbage patch and just barely survives the incident. The surrealism continues when Yōjin meets and falls into conversation with the deceased, headless boyfriend. Then there is also the strange moment when Yōjin appears to die and come back to life again.

For me, this film was a bit of a mystery. I wondered throughout if certain elements had some kind of symbolic or metaphoric meaning that might shed more light on how one should interpret the story (see the aside at the end of this blog entry).  As the storyline was difficult to comprehend, I found solace in the cinematography of Ryūto Kondō, whose work I have enjoyed before in Nonko 36-sai (Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, 2008) and A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen kokekkō, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2007). Kondō has a real knack for capturing the quiet beauty of the Japanese countryside.  

Bare Essence of Life is also an interesting film because of its use of Tsugaru dialect (津軽弁). It was the first time that I had seen a film where Ken’ichi Matsuyama uses his native dialect. Many of the smaller roles and extras (such as the children and the woman Yōjin has a food fight with) are locals without previous acting experience. They add a sense of realism to the rural Aomori setting, in stark contrast to the surrealistic plot elements.  All in all, a strange but somehow fascinating tale.

Director & Screenwriter

Satoko YOKOHAMA

Cinematographer

Ryūto KONDŌ

Music

Yoshihide OTOMO

Cast

Yōjin Mizuki • Ken’ichi MATSUYAMA

Machiko • Kumiko ASŌ

Ta Tanaka • Seiji NOZOE

Kanama Shimada • ARATA

Dr. Misawa • Yoshio HARADA

Shibata • Misako WATANABE

Ultra Miracle Love Story

Japanese Movie

"Ultra Miracle Love Story" Original Soundtrack

Original Soundtrack

"Ultra Miracle Love Story" Picture Book

Kayo Ume, Eri Okamoto

An aside for those who have seen the film:

I am not sure if there is any significance to the use of  cabbages & potatoes, apart from the fact that they grow them in Aomori – the prefecture is more famous for its apples. 

The bear is a symbol of masculinity among the Ainu of Hokkaido, and elsewhere in the world, so I imagine the same would be true in Aomori – but this does not satisfactorily explain the bizarre brain-in-a-jar sequence at the end of the film.

The brain as a symbol also puzzled me. I was reminded of the research an American friend of mine who studies medical ethics was doing in Tokyo when I lived there. She told me that heart transplants were rarely performed in Japan because of people’s reluctance to accept “brain-dead” as a reasonable reason to farm hearts for transplants. The word for heart in Japanese, kokoro (心), also means ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’, so unlike someone from western culture who believes that the spirit of the person is gone when they are declared ‘brain dead‘, in Japanese culture if the heart is still functioning, the person’s spirit still resides in the body. (There are other reasons, outlined nicely in this article). (htt So when Yōjin declares that he has a stopped heart and no brain, I wonder how a Japanese audience might interpret this differently from myself.

I would enjoy hearing the thoughts of others who have seen the film in the comments section.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010