วันพุธที่ 11 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. 2552

hana& alice (2004)

Title (Romaji): 花とアリス



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Story: Hana (Anne Suzuki) and Alice (Yu Aoi) are very close friends. They both share the same hobby, learning ballet and take pleasure in traveling by train. One day on their way to school they see young Masashi Miyamoto (Tomohiro Kaku), who is always absorbed in a book. Hana seems to find him attractive and so a few months later she tries to get into the same acting club he is already a member of. When she secretly follows him on his way home, she sees how he bumps his head and goes down. Hana takes advantage of his first confusion and tells him that he is suffering from amnesia and that she is in fact his girlfriend.
Masashi actually can remember anything, just not Hana and so he spends some time with her to get her to know better und to reawaken his memories. However, he can't find the feeling of love he is supposed to have towards her.
After all, the situation becomes even more complicated when Hana, because of some unfortunate circumstances, asks her friend Alice to pretend to be Myamoto's ex-girlfriend. Because of their made-up stories Hana and Alice can't see each other as frequently as before, and moreover, when Masashi talks with Alice, for him to get to know more about his past he also seems to fall in love with her.
Can the friendship of the two girls overcome the difficulties of the love triangle?


Review: Shunji Iwai is without a doubt one of Japans most extraordinary contemporary directors. His movies radiate an unique kind of magic, stand out because of their fascinating and dreamy atmosphere and are very worthwhile because of their wonderfully unusual cinematography. "Hana und Alice" is his latest movie and it can live up to what we came to expect of it after Iwais latest movies. It's not as profound as "All about Lily Chou-chou" or as entertaining as "Love Letter", yet in a very amusing way it takes us on a journey into the world of two best friends, who are wandering on their path of maturity, and doing so gain experience in what love is about as well. The love triangle, however, isn't really the center of events and so most of the time the film manages to balance between lighthearted comedy and drama, without getting lost into the usual cliches.

At first sight, Hana und Alice are two ordinary girls, but as time goes by we are introduced to their inner life and their living conditions. Their characters become surprisingly multi-layered and later on there seems to be only little left of their former childishness. Well, there is no better word than childish to describe their little games, and still, these games make the movie so entertaining and stand in strong contrast to the theme of growing up.
The story of Shunji Iwai is pretty good, even if it sometimes loses focus. On the other side, you can never be sure if Iwai really wanted to place more value on a certain aspect of the movie than on another one. Apparently, the love story with Myamoto is given priority. What is love? Can love be forced? Will the love triangle drive a wedge between the two friends? All these questions are part of the drama aspect of the film, nevertheless, sometimes throughout the movie we realize that this isn't the essence of what Iwai wanted to tell us. Myamoto is merely another paving-stone on the girls' path of growing up, and even though the two might seem to be inseparable, at the end both of them have to walk this path on their own.

Hana is played by Anne Suzuki who already made a name for herself in "Returner" or "Initial D". Hana and her relationship with Myamoto is nice to look at, yet Myamoto himself just remains too shallow. Actor Tomohiro Kaku most of the time just looks stoical and confused and somehow the relationship never gains any momentum because of this. To the movie's credit, this is mainly so, because he has no feelings for Hana. The scenes he shares with Alice are more emotional and imbued with a certain amount of warmth, so that you actually have the feeling to watch a real romance unfold. Hana's love is an unrequited one and so it simply lacks the spirit. The change concerning these feelings towards the end are somewhat confusing to say the least. Alice gives up on her possible love relationship and yet she is not down or regretting her decision, while Hana slowly can arouse feelings for her in Myamoto. The question remains if this is really so or if the characters actually have by far more different feelings than what we get to see. This is something every viewer has to decide for himself as Shunji Iwai somewhat abruptly brings this topic to a finish and shifts his focus on the more important relationship between the two girls, again. Leaving us in a limbo concerning the love story.

In addition to Anne Suzuki, who with her slightly rough character is the more self-confident of the two friends, Yu Aoi is also turning in a credible performance. Her character seems to be more multilayered, even if we get to know her better only later in the movie. The main reason why she is more interesting than Hana is the simple fact that we get to see more of her living conditions. There is a nice insertion with her father, who seems to visit her seldomly, because he got a divorce from Alice's mother. Even though there is some tension between Alice and her father, at the end it's obvious, that they love each other, even when they can't express it in their own language and have to use mandarin chinese, which Alice interestingly enough doesn't speak. Yet, she intuitively manages to hit the right rising and falling tones of the language that the likes of us laboriously have to learn for months...

Furthermore, Alice also has a little side story with her mother going on, who desperately tries to get a new boyfriend, and thus kicks her daughter out of house, whenever she has a date. Moreover, during the course of the movie Alice is spotted by a talent scout, but the girl soon has to realize, that she has neither the acting skills nor the self confidence that is required to get a job. This changes when in a small magical scene she expresses herself through a small ballet dance performance, which is one of the movie's true highlights.
Hana's living conditions on the other hand remain in the dark. Except from her house, which is filled with lots of flowers, and a short humorous gaze at her mother, we don't get to know much of the girl. However, towards the end we understand that Alice brought her in touch with ballet dancing and helped her to get rid of the shell she hid behind all the time, becoming the person who she is now.
In the end lots of problems and interesting stories are left unfinished, e.g. the plot revolving around the mother or the father of Alice. This may be frustrating for some viewers. But this is exactly Iwai's handwriting: He grants us a peek into the life of his characters and even though there is lots of stuff happening around them, this is merely adding to the movie's authenticity and doesn't serve any special purpose. Which is why the film is not supposed to answer certain questions or solve some of the problems.

Shunji Iwai as always remains true to his style and enchants the viewer with warm and dreamy pictures, which are mainly created by the strong use of soft sunlight shining through windows. The camera movements sometimes remind us of a hand camera, which still is something I can't get used to, but the music by Shunji Iwai himself fits perfectly into the rest, even if some of the piano pieces are a little bit too complex to be used as background music. Classic music is nothing to be listened to passively, but you have to get involved with it in a more active way of listening. This is why a few pieces feel a bit inappropriate.
With its running time of 135 minutes "Hana and Alice" seems to be quite long, but apart from a greater slowdown in the middle the film fortunately proves to be really entertaining and in addition also provides us with a nice subtle humour. As it is typical with Iwai the movie's strength lies in its heart-warming atmosphere, which makes the end product, despite some rather emotional scenes, not really a drama. It's just a movie about the friendship of two girls and their path of becoming mature. At the end, when the ending credits hit the screen you will be strongly satisfied, although you might find it hard to pinpoint why, because "Hana and Alice" surely has some sore points. However, there is something with Iwai's movies that always manages to touch you - like a warm ray of sunshine touching your face...



From the above synopsis, it may sound as if Hana & Alice is a dopey chick flick full of goofy romance and an over-the-top plot, but such is strangely far from the case. Funny events do take place, but dramatic elements take precedence over the funny, with slow build-up and many character-building sequences. While the film is not strictly realistic, a strong sense of verisimilitude is incorporated via the use of almost documentary style cinematography and ample naturalistic lighting. Characters take center stage over plot machinations, and the end result is far superior in my opinion to most sappy, slight chick flicks.

Anne Suzuki's portrayal of Hana is nuanced and at times emotionally intense as she pulls on her significant acting skills to reproduce the selfish personality of her character. At first it is Hana who seems less confident next to Alice's enthusiasm and physical beauty, but then she pursues her crush with more wherewithal than Alice can even muster when auditioning for commercials and photo shoots. And when Suzuki is called upon to engage the waterworks, the emotions she exhibits seem strikingly real, a tribute to her very real talent.

Yu Aoi's Alice is a much more sympathetic role, and Aoi's performance is, overall, subtler than Suzuki's, with her character's more understated personality. Alice is in the center of a broken family, forced to take care of a slovenly divorced mother who actively chases after men and shows little affection for her daughter. Alice doesn't see her father often, but in the one sequence in which they are together her confusion and obvious affection for her dad is obvious. Her participation in Hana's deception of the boy is never malicious, but she sustains it as a help to her friend and as an excuse to relieve some of her loneliness in the acquaintance of a kind male friend. Her name, "Alice," is actually a nickname derived from her surname, Arisugawa, and is rendered in katakana in the film's Japanese title; katakana is often used for foreign loan words and other, less formal usages, almost as if Alice is using her nickname to separate herself from her painful family situation.

Tomohiro Kaku as the boy is less impressive, but he has less to work with. Frankly, his character is rather dull—though part of a comedy club at school, he is completely terrible at telling jokes, rendering them in a monotone, and he doesn't seem to have any significant friends. He appears to be something of a bookworm, but it isn't clear what he is interested in outside of comedy, and his family life is never explored. The intent of the film seems to have been to make him as boring as possible, underscoring that Hana and Alice's attraction towards him is based more on the early idealization of him and his friend, as well as the fact that he is a convenient male to fill the roles missing in the girls' lives. The boy's name, Masashi Miyamoto, is a slight corruption of the name of a famous samurai from Japan's history, highlighting again that his stature in their eyes is fantasy. Amusingly, his comedian name given to him by the leader of the comedy club is "Bakuhatsu," which means "explosion"—completely inappropriate for the ultimately unexciting boy.

Music throughout the film is gorgeous instrumental with strong piano and string motifs. It was easy for me to get caught up in the melodious strains, and what's even more impressive is that all original music was composed by Shunji Iwai, the director of the film.

The weakest link in the experience, however, is far and away the subtitles. There are a number of points in which significant portions of dialogue are not translated, such as when the boy Miyamoto is reciting his comedy sketch to himself, or towards the end when the head of the comedy club is performing on-stage and parts of his ludicrous act are skimmed over. It's frustrating because it feels as if the translators just decided that certain sections of the dialogue were unimportant, rather than leaving that discretion up to the viewers to decide. Furthermore, of slight annoyance is the placement of the subs, which sometimes alternate from the bottom up to the top of the screen and then back down again—not because too many people are talking at once, but perhaps because of contrast issues. Whatever the reason, it was distracting.

I also want to take a little time to note some issues of translation in general because some common issues have been preying on my mind lately. Increasingly my friends have been complaining about the way in which film dialogue is translated, especially cusswords, because they know just enough of Japanese to know that these words and some other phrases are not being rendered literally, and they have an aversion for foul language. Actually, complaints about translations are common, with fanboys all across the Internet picking apart and complaining about various movies without understanding even an inkling of what the task is like when translating a text. Really, the topic deserves an entire article unto itself. The fact of the matter is, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of words in Japanese that don't have direct English translations, and if those words are literally rendered in our language, they would sound extremely strange and therefore lose their original, culturally-specific punch. In the case of Hana and Alice, the translators decided to render many of the girls' exclamations as "Jesus" or "Christ," and it is very obvious that in the original Japanese these particular words (or even their equivalents) aren't used because in general the Japanese don't swear using Christian themes. Frankly, I don't like the use of profanity (as opposed to vulgarity or obscenity) in translating Japanese because it is putting our religion-derived swear words in the mouths of foreigners, which makes them sound very out-of-place due to the characters' background, and as a Christian myself, profanity in particular is offensive to me. Profanity isn't just disagreeable words labeled unrespectable by social mores; profanity is disrespectful and worse towards a belief set which I and many others hold to be absolutely true. Nevertheless, I do understand why they did it—a direct translation would have sounded odd at best, which may have distracted from the intended impact of the moment in the context of the story. Be that as it may, I would prefer translators rely on expressions that are not so culturally-centered, such as religious swear words, and attempt to translate via more universal expression. For example, when translating the cry of dismay sayaku (which I have heard translated as "worst"), it seems to make more sense (in the context of Japanese culture) to say "No way!" or "Oh no!" rather than "Christ!"

Despite these issues, however, I believe Hana & Alice is a strong film, with a beautiful score, well-thought-out story, strong characterizations and very solid acting from the main actresses. Hana & Alice easily helped solidify my respect for both Suzuki and Aoi, and I look forward to seeing more of their work elsewhere. As far as chick flicks go, I think this one was even better than Nana (2005), which I also enjoyed quite a bit. While not ground-breaking, Hana & Alice is intelligent entertainment, and a very good reminder that not all Japanese movies have to be about samurai and giant monsters to be fine entertainment.

04:58PM TH

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