Bare-assed Japan

Ishii Yuya is a young film maker and this is a recent film that won the main prize at the PIA Film Festival in Tokyo in 2007. Yet since this film, Ishii has made no less than three new features. Just like Bare-assed Japan, they are made almost laconically, they are populated by everyday but not all too ordinary people and are set at very ordinary and hence unusual locations. And they are funny. They have a strange, absurd, dry and occasionally black humour.
The focus of this film is the young man Komatsu Taro (Toyone Yuichi), who doesn’t really know what he has to do with his life after secondary school. He dreams of a cottage in the country to grow vegetables and even manages to get hold of one, although it is an ugly cottage in an ugly place. To his own surprise, the girl he has an eye on also wants to come along to his cottage. A less opportune event is that his grandfather has a fatal accident and his alcoholic unemployed father follows him to his haven of rest. It isn’t easy to live off your own piece of land for these clumsy citydwellers.
The people in the film are charming thanks to their awkwardness and their awkwardness characterises the film itself to a certain extent. The tempo of the film and the way it was edited ideally suit the casual absurdity of the lives of its protagonists. (GjZ)

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