Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2024, 1999, 124 and 102 mins, in Japanese with subtitles
Cast: Masaki Suda, Koji Yakusho, Kotone Furukawa, Jan Fubuki
Review by Colin Dibben
The first half of Cloud inhabits uncanny Hitchcock territory, very nicely indeed. Young, affectless factory worker Yoshii (Suda) has a canny sideline. He buys items cheap from distressed small business owners, then sells them online with a massive mark-up. After a couple of lucrative scores, he can afford to leave the city and rent a large rural house-cum-warehouse with his girlfriend Akiko (Furukawa).
But things start to go wrong: rumours that Yoshii’s goods are fake go viral, a rock is thrown through their bedroom window, a masked intruder appears from nowhere. As his business and his relationship falter, Yoshii finds himself up against violent people, not knowing who to trust.
Kurosawa’s oblique, slightly deadzone style works well to build a sense of credible, nameless dread, but that feeling bleeds away in the second half, which is largely an extended, rather childish, bland gun battle in a disused warehouse. All of a sudden, a supporting character has unlikely underworld access to big guns – well, that is convenient, isn’t it?
Charisma, from 1999, sees Kurosawa in stranger, more allegorical territory. Yabuike (Yakusho) is a cop on leave who finds himself in a strange rural environment, where different factions are trying to protect or destroy a totemic tree called Charisma.
Yabuike appears to be the embodied deciding factor in an explicit argument: should Charisma be saved even if it is poisoning all the other trees in the forest? There is something quite nihilistic and catastrophic in Yabuike’s solution, but perhaps that is because he has come to embody charisma itself and the necessary dangers that brings with it.
Visually and thematically, I picked up a Tarkovsky vibe from Charisma – the Tarkovsky of Solaris, Stalker and The Sacrifice. But there are also militia and scientists, gun play and stolen money.
Charisma will probably confuse you, but there is something beguiling there too. Kurosawa uses very deliberate pacing and shots to create this intriguing atmosphere. In both films, in fact.
There is something so distinctive about Kurosawa’s oblique style that it is difficult to define it. He makes thrillers which often have an apocalyptic or sci-fi angle. Included here is a good extra, an essay looking at the director’s career and putting it in a film culture context.
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