By [For the month of July, we will be covering the New York Asian Film Festival and the (also New York-based) Japan Cuts Film Festival, which together form one of the largest showcases of Asian cinema in the world. For our NYAFF coverage, head over here. For Japan Cuts, here.]
Over the weekend I ran into DBBorroughs from Unseen Films. We talked about the movies we’d seen over the last month through the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts, and we both felt that movies that distinguished themselves through strangeness had a certain pull to them. Maybe it’s because there’s something undeniably pleasing about seeing images you’ve never seen before, or considering the world from a unique (and sometimes oddball) point of view. That’s one of the ways that art can move us — giving us something different.
I bring this up because in Toad’s Oil, a strange and heartwarming comedy directed by the actor Koji Yakusho, a man kicks a bear in the gonads. That’s like a bowling ball-sized cherry atop the film’s other (comparatively less kooky) eccentricities.
All movies can be improved by just such a moment.
Toad’s Oil (Gama no Abura | ガマの油)
Director: Koji Yakusho
Rating: NR
Country: Japan
If you were to look past the strangeness, Toad’s Oil shares some DNA with another Koji Yakusho film I watched recently, the non-strange drama Chronicle of My Mother. (Still good despite its lack of bears getting kicked in the crotch.) Both star Yakusho, obviously. Both deal with multi-generational family relationships — it’s straightforward in Chronicle, while in Toad’s Oil there are occasional, invisible spirits of the past. Both have nods to the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. There’s also a sense of fathers and sons becoming like each other. In Chronicle of My Mother, it’s sons becoming their fathers, here in Toad’s Oil, it’s as if we’re looking at a father becoming his son.
Yakusho’s character in Toad’s Oil is Takuro Yazawa, a rich stay-at-home day trader prone to histrionic outbursts. He has an arsenal of plastic pellet guns on racks around the room, and rows of iMacs on long tables to help him make his deals. He dresses like Indiana Jones with a tie at one point; there’s some sense that Takuro never quite grew up. Takuro’s so loony that after his son falls in a coma from a car accident, he pretends to be his son and flirts with his son’s girlfriend, Hikari, over the phone. (It’s not quite as creepy as it sounds, but it’s bizarre.) That’s where lots of the trouble starts, particularly when his son’s condition takes a turn for the worse.
The set up is all about an innocent deception that snowballs into human drama. All that puppy love and between a middle-aged goofball and his son’s cutesy girlfriend suddenly has this new moral and ethical dimension to it. The strangeness of the film helps enhance the more realistic elements — that odd way that you can play opposites off each other to make both more resonant. It’s almost like a kind of seasoning, or, since it is in a sense Takuro’s film, the strangeness may even be a glimpse into the way the character views the world.
Something central to film’s worldview is a man in feudal garb selling toad’s oil (the Japanese equivalent of snake oil) through theatrical grunts and mannerisms. He does so with the help of a silent assistant played by Satomi Kobayashi, who also plays Takuro’s wife. At first these scenes are jarring. It appears unexpectedly, like a brief disconnect that rattles you out of the movie. Yet what at first feels like a non sequitur winds up being folded into the film’s other bits of strangeness. Little beliefs about family and magic and spirits get implanted in the mind. There’s a design to it all if you just let the story play out, and Yakusho keeps the interest going through this sense of unpredictability.
Even though Toad’s Oil is Yakusho’s directorial debut, it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a certain confidence behind the camera, and there’s always a sense of control to the material. This is especially important with a movie that deals with such major shifts in tone and reality. You need a certain amount of authority to guide an audience through such strange places, and Yakusho maintains it. I suppose this also has to do with your propensity (or tolerance) for the strange.
Yet the strange can be beautiful, and Toad’s Oil is a film full of beautiful moments. It’s visually lush, which serves the elements of magical realism well. The stars in night sky seems brighter, with a shimmer like lightning bugs; the forests become much more lush, greens crackled with blooms of yellow and red; and even something as simple as a boxy, vintage Winnebago suddenly seems so interesting to look at.
The performances, though varied, all have weight to them, like actual people have been plopped into the odd world of Toad’s Oil. There are moments between Takuro his son’s friend Akiba (Junichi Sawayashiki) that are tender. (Perhaps there’s also a funny undercurrent to these exchanges given that Sawayashiki is a professional kickboxer. I’m not sure how it plays to Japanese audiences.) The same tenderness is there when you watch Hikari interact with her lonely grandmother.
Thinking about tenderness and strangeness, I think the strangeness of Toad’s Oil helps soften many moments that would be too sentimental in a more conventional movie. In a film full off eccentricity and wonderment, sentimentality feels more like a genuine expression of emotion rather than a forced one. It’s as if by being broad, varied, and bizarre, you can purify sentimentality into its truer expression of feeling.
It’s doesn’t always work, though. Toad’s Oil is at times sentimental given what it tries to say about family and human interaction, and even strangeness can’t prevent certain palpable tugs at the heartstrings. It’s not something I have against the film, however. I was carried off by other elements, like bears getting kicked in the crotch and pellet guns and Takuro’s quest to do something right for his son. It’s just the way Takuro’s world works, and it’s a strange and beautiful place to live.
