vanishing point. - Review - movie review

Film Comment, May, 2001 by Tony Pipolo

Part road movie, part psychological fable, Eureka is a mesmerizing three-and-a-half-hour film from Japan in which three hijack survivors come together as a makeshift family unit and journey in search of release from their trauma.

Exorcising demons is not just the stuff of horror films -- as Shinji Aoyama demonstrates in his beautiful and original Eureka. Shown last tall at the New York Film Festival after winning two prizes at Cannes, it is the 37-year-old writer-director's sixth theatrical feature in six years. Aoyama calls it a "prayer liar modern man ... searching for the courage to go on living." The opening certainly strikes an unsettling note: against a panoramic, sepiatoned view of an industrial landscape, the back of a young girls head rises into the frame, dominating the foreground. Offscreen, we hear her say, "A tidal wave is coming soon. I am sure," and on the cut to her face she con!trams, "It will sweep us all away." What unfolds over the next three and a half hours is not some ecologically minded, futuristic epic, but a moving psychological fable about trauma, loss mourning, and healing -- a mesmerizing journey across genre boundaries that requires both its running time and the width of the cinemascope screen to build what is ultimately the strangest of family psychodramas.

In Eureka's first few minutes, a public, bus is hijacked by a passenger who kills several people and is about to shoot the driver and a teenage brother and sister when he is gunned down by the police. The film !races the traumatic effects this event has on the survivors. The bus driver, Makoto (whose name means "truthful" or "direct"), disappears and returns two years later. The brother and sister (Naoki and Kozue) subsequently lose both parents -- their mother leaves without explanation; their father dies in a car crash -- and remain speechless, except in voiceover, until near the end of the film. They are lending for themselves when Makoto reappears and moves in with them. His motives, vague even to himself, provide tension in the film's first half, especially once he becomes the prime suspect in the murders of several young women. (Note to readers who haven't seen the film: key plot information is disclosed in what follows.)

Our suspicions shift when Aoyama cuts to a shot of a dazed Naoki in the marshland area where the killer's victims have been found. Lured into speculation about the identity of the serial killer, we hardly notice the film's real subject sneaking up on us. But when Makoto turns up with a bus and suggests a trip, starting from the site where the hostage standoff occurred, his manner begins to suggest a method. The film's final 90 minutes is a road movie of sorts, the bus functioning as a womb-like space in which all three survivors journey toward a confrontation with their fears.

Lightening this rather grim atmosphere is a fourth character, the teenagers' loquacious, wise-beyond-his-years cousin Akihiko, who is basically a family spy. He is played by Yohichiroh Saitoh, an Aoyama regular, whose comic persona -- also on display in Aoyama's yakuza film parody Wild Life (97) -- counteracts the quiet intensity of Koji Yakusho's Makoto and the moodily inscrutable teens, played by real-life brother and sister Masaru and Aoi Miyazaki.

Aoyama's style dutifully nods to past Japanese masters: rigorously framed interiors suggest Ozu, while the exterior camera movements evoke Mizoguchi; and his preference for long takes over shot/countershot certainly recalls Imamura. But the film also evokes John Ford's The Searchers, which Aoyama has said he was thinking about during production. We see this in the way Makoto's and Akihiko's arrivals at the teens' home are flamed to mark them as outsiders about to upset the brother and sister's cocoon-like existence. More important, Aoyama is apparently fascinated by the sudden transformation from rage to all-embracing love in John Wayne's character at the end of Ford's film, when Ethan sweeps his niece off her feet and, instead of killing her, says, "Let's go home." This is the final line of Eureka, spoken by Makoto to Kozue -- who, like Natalie Wood's Debbie, has also been violently wrenched from her childhood.

Aoyama seems to believe that the polarity embodied in the Ethan Edwards character -- the urge to kill and the acceptance of love -- expresses a dilemma endemic to the human condition. In an earlier film -- aptly titled An Obsession (97), in some ways a forerunner of Eureka -- two characters, a terminally ill serial killer and his moony girlfriend, assert that the only way to prove one's love is to kill, and in the end they do just that. This twisted sentiment haunts the detective who pursues them, until he concludes that the only answer is devoting your life to another person.

While An Obsession is an elegantly shot thriller, this theme resonates more powerfully in the less genre-bound Eureka, set in motion when the crazed hijacker asks Makoto if he's ever wished he were someone else, then adds that he once did, "but now I'm just sick of everything." The link between psychic despair and its social consequences has rarely been so tersely articulated. Later, Makoto admits to Akihiko, who still suspects that he might be the serial killer, that he has fought the temptation to kill. The film is at its weakest when its themes are verbalized in this way. Overall, Aoyama's instincts for allowing the narrative to unfold slowly, and for its psychodynamics to be manifested through the smallest and subtlest gestures, are utterly right. The same rationale underlies his minimal use of shot/countershot, a technique that enforces the kind of assertive interaction between characters that is beyond Naoki's and Kozue's capacity and the opposite of Makoto's patient, abiding manner.