A serious film for serious people, Bright Future is the story of a doomed father/son relationship told within an allegory of a mutating, poisonous jellyfish. The film itself is like the jellyfish, potentially lethal to normal people, but real nonetheless. Such is the stuff of director/writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who paints a picture both fuzzy and sharp of the anger and unrest in modern social institutions.
Mamoru Asana (played by Tadanobu Asano) works at a menial, dead-end job with Yuji Nimura (Joe Ogadiri) in a factory deathly in its boredom. Each hates the job and is overwhelmed with loathing when their boss, the mildly aggressive and totally generation-gapped Mr. Fujiwara (Takashi Sasano) offers them full time employment. This full time employment is a significant step, it is a commitment to life-long allegiance and demands commitment. He offers a cash bonus, on the spot, if they will commit to the factory. Fujiwara wants companionship as well as a continuation of the plant as he retires. But the boys want nothing to do with the broken adult spending the last years of his productive life working as an automaton. Unknown to the audience, Mamoru decides to kill him.
The boys spend most of their time hanging around in near silence in their apartment, where Mamoru is raising the jellyfish. The photography of the jellyfish always includes a strange glow that brings the viewer right into the depths of the transparent, fleshy invertebrate. We are invited inside the jellyfish as we are invited inside the minds of the two room-mates. Their lives are stark, a never-ending present with no future and no past. The film is about anger and about the inability of society to understand it. Mamoru pampers the jellyfish with great care; gradually reducing the salinity in the tank towards some mysterious goal.
When the boss Fujiwara visits the boys to bore them with his TV watching, Mamoru lets the older man approach the jellyfish tank. It is only a sting this time, but the boss gets the message. There are things happening beneath the surface that he doesn’t understand. Lethal things.
The DVD includes a 75-minute special feature entitled “Ambivalent Future.” More than just a DVD extra, Ambivalent Future is a priceless look inside Kurosawa as well as an excellent slice of directorial practice. The feature follows the making of the film from beginning to end and intersperses selected takes with Kurosawa’s philosophy of film making and the film media. Kurosawa does not believe in absolute reality, or in absolute fiction, but in a fuzzy line between the two. There is some documentary in all narrative and there is some fiction in all documentary.
He does not believe in completely defining either the characters or the story. He throws in effects, movements and surroundings that are spontaneous and out of the screenplay. Life is like that, he says; not based on minute-by-minute rehearsals or reviews of past history. Each moment is random and only the sum of the moments make up the complete story. Bright Future is like that, too. It is hard to define the film scene-by-scene. Several have to be taken together to arrive at a range of possible feelings and directions. The plot of the film is a sum of general suggestions and intimations. The physical rendition of the story is a series of documentary film clips, each with its own expression of the underlying rage of the characters.<!--page-->
Kurosawa uses the term “Clint Eastwood--Dirty Harry” to express the type of acting he wanted from his leads. Dirty Harry is not mad at anyone in particular, he is mad at everybody. Beyond that, he does not, or can not, articulate his rage. In this way the film becomes a picture of rage against hopeless odds.
The vague plan about the jellyfish is the only plan in the boys’ lives. Everything else is spontaneous, including the killing that lands Mamoru in prison. When Yuji visits him in prison, he places the full care and breeding of the jellyfish in Yuji’s hands. When Mamoru's father, Shin-ichiro, (Tatsuya Fuji) visits his condemned son in prison, the two have nothing to say. When Mamoru exits his worldly shell he leaves both his father and best friend in similar states of shock. Each goes through their own living deaths as they deal with the loss. Shin-ichiro semi-adopts Yuji as his son and they both go through the paces of living, first in denial and eventually in acceptance of the world as it is.
This pits the rage of Mamoru against his father and eventually that of his father against Yuji. The battle is eventually reconciled, but the war rages on, insane as it is. Kurosawa believes that actors and film makers have to be partially insane to reach the underlying themes that are part of the filmmaking process. It is not the stuff of normal people, whom he despises. Nothing personal. It is not the people he hates, but the normalcy. Clint Eastwood—Dirty Harry.
The jellyfish evolves to meet its new environment, as do we all. Society dies a little with each evolution, and Yuji is left to carry on with the love of a father for his son and the hatred of the displaced young for humanity with no room for change. Normal people escape. The filmmaker can not escape. He has to see the pictures inside.
The DVD is out in the USA now and available via Amazon . No word on a UK release as yet.
Further details and trailer links in our database .
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