Otoshiana

In a mining ghost town, the wild and indifferent son wanders around the dead body of his working-class father - a living spirit before death - symbolizing the fate of his class. The deceased father, who dreamed of trade unions during his life, becomes a powerless object in the game, confirming the helplessness of the unions in the face of their killers: we notice a mirrored reflection - a rich murderer controlling and killing the main character X, a mining company that has controlled and instigated these two rival unions from the beginning. If there has ever been a fusion of "subjective" existentialism and "objective" social realism in the history of film (which poor Sartre tried to achieve in philosophy in a slightly different form!), then it is here. Yet the film offers even more: a description of media manipulation or latent social and human conflicts, activated not by the random, but the contingent interplay of events - after all, latent hatred /the two union leaders/ or the inevitability of fate /the main protagonist, the woman from the shop/ are not purely random phenomena, but rather somehow just waiting for their activation. This brings us back to the fusion of the objective pole (the working and living conditions of the characters) and the subjective pole (the characters' reactions to events, their incomprehensibility to the participants, etc.). All of this is captured in a typical Japanese purist camera style. (10.04.2015)