The best film in Cannes this year was DAI NIPPONJIN (Big Japanese Man) by comedian Matsumoto Hitoshi that screened in the Director's Fortnight. Unlike some of the dreary and pretentious films in the main competition (in particular Sukhorov's ALEXANDRA and Kusturica's PROMISE ME THIS which surely represent low points of Eastern Euro art cinema - as if we cared) DAI NIPPONJIN was a crafty, intelligent deconstruction of the Japanese monster movie, and Japanese masculinity.
The movie is shot like a TV documentary (in particular the insistent almost desperate Japanese TV documentary with its inane commentary) but to call this a "mockumentary" is to limit its scope. It centers around a slacker, has-been super hero who lives in a dump of a six tatami mat apartment, and whose TV ratings have been falling. Just what kind of super hero he is is soon revealed when some strange elastic monster attacks Tokyo. Our super hero is connected to the electrical grid which pumps him up to Godzilla-sized proportions. In this configuration he sheds his slacker outfit and appears like a giant sumo wrestler wearing only a pair of purple underpants. His unkempt hair stands up straight on end, like that Kid'n Play guy in HOUSE PARTY. He struggles with the monster, stomping on a few freeways and talk buildings in the process.
But the fact that he is successful is boring for his TV audience. In between bouts with these eccentric and intensely surrealistic monsters, we learn more about our superhero. He has tried to live up to his father and grandfather's standards (both were super heroes as well) but he feels something of a failure. Ironically it is when he is a demonstrable failure - when he is beaten around by another invading monster - that his TV ratings go up and interest in his appearances revives.
The end of the film is stunning - in a sudden switch of gears, the film is propelled into a sardonic and caustic take on Saturday morning TV shows in the genre of MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS as appropriated by Bushite America.
Its depiction of a world created and perceived by TV as a reality show (isn't that our world now?) but inhabited by larger-than-life characters, DAI NIPPONJIN falls into the anarcho-surrealist animus of the society of the spectacle. It captures perfectly our contemporary aesthetic propagated by reality TV - the humiliation of the Other. It's a trait of puritanical societies to humiliate in order to purify - why else did the most successful late 20th century reality TV shows originate from the Endemol production company in the Netherlands, the home of Dutch puritanism which then crossed the Atlantic to the United States? DAI NIPPONJIN understands this from the Japanese perspective with that country's equally puritanical aesthetic.
The most interesting strain of Japanese cinema is thus established - it is a line that runs from singing frogs in the 1960s, to the social struggles of the tournament ring in CALAMARI WRESTLER, finds its purest expression in EXECUTIVE KOALA and is cleverly matched in DAI NIPPONJIN. This aesthetic of anthropomorphism can be traced back to the fox myth in Japanese culture but it is also, in the past few years, a strong riposte to the inanities and mediocrity of 3D animation and those awful Miyazaki cartoons.
In the Hello Kitty society of Japan, films like EXECUTIVE KOALA and DAI NIPPONJIN, are in the forefont of resistance.
