R100 (Hiroshi Matsu, 2013): Japan

reviewed by Alan Gueler, viewed at the AFI Fest

R100

R100 (Hiroshi Matsu, 2013) is one of the best movies of this year. Editing, sound, cinematography, overheads, camera angles and mise-en-scen is spot-on and to mix that with a weird typical Japanese narrative and some very funny jokes makes this movie very enjoyable.

The performance from Mao Daichi is stunning and beautiful, who plays a middle aged schizophrenic father who is constantly assaulted by his imaginary creatures that only exists in his mind , but the real hero in this movie is the Hiroshi Matsu and editor Yoshitaka Honda, with the specific style and  accuracy, they’re making this movie into a masterpiece.

The stoy is about Mao Daichi’s character joining a club, with no cancellation. By getting a membership, strange women appear in his head and physically torments him  everyday and he has to find a way to stop it.

I absolutely love the way that this movie is shot. Sometimes I thought about how I was able to hang along with the narrative, because it was so fuzzy. But then I noticed that the director uses familiar image on the screen so that you always could relate link the pieces.

The movie has a lot of weird long shots with unusual objects in the way, a certain kind of shots I only have seen once before and that’s in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill vol. 1. The shot I mean is in a fighting scene moves away from the fight and focuses on a piece of the production design and then back to the fight scene again which makes you more involved in the movie. In this movie, the protagonist gets beaten down in the restroom and the camera switches to an angle where a toilet paper roll on the ground is in focus and the fight is in the background, out of focus and then back to a close-up. It’s different. Artistic. Enjoyable.
The Tarantino shot I was talking about is Kiddo’s (Uma Thurman) and O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) final fight.

Even Though the film is a drama comedy, it’s filmed as a horror. All the characters have low key lightning on their faces and most of the footage is in night time, and the footage that was shot in bright daylight has a very well processed set design and color corrected image to make it feel like things are bad for the protagonist even in daytime

I have to give some extra credit to the composer Shuichi Sakamoto for his astonishing work on the soundtrack. What makes the score in this movie so special is that it becomes one with the visual effects The soundtrack may have been the factor to that the movie brought up the emotions that it did. After doing some research on him, I found out that this is his first movie ever to compose the soundtrack and I won’t be surprised if he composes the next big upcoming Hollywood films.

This is a very good movie and I highly recommend it to anyone over age 16 to see it, it is a complete movie and very enjoyable. Other Hollywood movies that share the same style  as this is Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) and Scott Pilgrim vs. the world (2010).
Four out of five toasters!