Tokyo Film Fest: THE CLONE RETURNS TO THE HOMELAND Review
[Our thanks to James Hadfield for another quality film review from Tokyo.]
I wish that I hadn't gone to a press conference and then watched Chinese disaster flick Super Typhoon so soon after seeing this, because it didn't give me nearly enough time to digest it. Kanji Nakajima's film will undoubtedly be dismissed as long-winded and pretentious in some quarters, but I was really impressed by it. This is philosophical, art-house sci-fi in the vein of Solaris and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Following the death of a colleague and still plagued by memories of the accident that killed his twin brother during childhood (depicted in a grueling flashback that actually moved me to tears), astronaut Kohei (Mitsuhiro Oikawa) agrees to participate in a controversial cloning program. Should he die in the course of duty, he will be reproduced, complete with his current memories - a process that his superior euphemistically describes as "medical treatment." Predictably, things don't work out so smoothly in practice.
This is a complex, ambiguous film that raises plenty of questions about the nature of identity and memory. The disgraced scientist who developed the cloning technology (Tooru Shinagawa) cautions that the human mind isn't just a puzzle that can be put back together piece-by-piece, while Kohei's wife (Hiromi Nagasaku) insists that even a perfect copy of her husband won't be the same.
Their concerns are vindicated in the remainder of the film, but rather than meet these issue head-on, Nakajima's script takes a more abstract approach. The final third shifts into a dreamlike territory, as successive clones of Kohei go wandering across a damp, mist-strewn countryside in search of his childhood home. It's an obvious metaphor, but these drawn-out, meandering scenes are beautiful to watch and ultimately leave the viewer to make their own conclusions.
The Clone Returns to the Homeland counts Wim Wenders as an executive producer, which will hopefully ensure that it gets some kind of distribution overseas. It's certainly one of the more ambitious and thought-provoking Japanese films I've seen this year.
Review by James Hadfield
