Who’s Camus Anyway? (Kamyu Nante Shiranai) review

In 1976, Mitsuo Yanagimachi made his first feature film, the documentary about a Japanese biker gang Godspeed You! Black Emperor. After that he continued on with his career, keeping a documentarian perspective of character development even in works of fiction. While watching his films the viewer, for the most part, is there to observe a series of events without having any opportunity to judge the motivations behind them. His characters are rarely good or bad, they just are who they are, regardless of how it affects (or doesn’t affect) the story. This realistic approach to film-making has gained Yanagimachi a steady stream of glowing reviews and critical acclaim over the years, but never so much as a sniff of mass appeal some of his contemporaries enjoy. Perhaps this is the reason he stopped making films in 1995, instead choosing to teach film at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University. After a few years of casually observing the idiosyncrasies of current-day university students Yanagimachi was once again inspired to create a film.

Who’s Camus Anyway? is based, not surprisingly, on a university campus and follows a group of film students during the five days leading up to the shoot of their film called The Bored Murderer. In the script, a young man brutally kills an old woman for no other reason than to see how it would feel. At first the androgynous lead actor Ikeda (Hideo Nakaizumi) doesn’t quite understand the character but the film’s director, Naoki (Shuuji Kashiwabara) is of little help. The assistant director, Kiyoki (Ai Maeda), tells Ikeda to read Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger” because she sees similarities between his role and the book’s main character, Meursault. When he mixes up “Meursault” with “Inspector Clouseau” it doesn’t seem like he’ll be able to figure things out in time, but he somehow seems to have an instinctive and occasionally chilling understanding of the role regardless of his outwardly flighty persona. This is evidenced by the fact that he repeatedly disputes the dumbed-down take Naoki has on how he should be playing the character. Naoki’s insistence that the character’s motivations be conveyed through overly-simplistic emotional outbursts probably mirrors some of the criticism Yanagimachi has received for his own work in the past.

Throughout the film the characters’ personal lives begin to overlap with the theme of the The Bored Murderer. At several points they engage in destructive behavior just “to see how it would feel” as the line between film and reality becomes increasingly blurred. Unfortunately, though completely understandably, an unbiased observational portrayal of the private lives of university students often makes them look rather bratty, petty, uncaring, and generally unlikable. While this is probably very realistic, it also causes a big chunk of the film to be dedicated to annoying emotionally-inept relationship drama which doesn’t really seem to fit in what is otherwise a tightly-woven story about the filmmaking process and film in general. Emotionally shallow and manipulative people may be completely realistic, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch a movie about them. In that way it seems as though interweaving the characters’ personal lives with the film they’re making was overreaching and provided the only criticism I have for an otherwise great film. While I understand the merits of Yanagimachi’s straight-forward, unapologetic approach to character-(non)development, I also think just a little bit of humanizing goes a long way. You certainly don’t have to bash the audience over the head with back-story and spell out every aspect of their personas, but at the same time it probably wouldn’t hurt to give us a reason not to hate them all and stop caring about what happens to them. And to be honest, that’s what happened to me while watching this film. Only a downright amazing ending saved what was starting to become a fairly disappointing experience.

View trailer (permalink)

Tags