Loft Review
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Loft has become something of a holy grail amongst his fans, one of those titles closely followed and tracked throughout its production that has remained frustratingly difficult to see in any format and completely unavailable on English language release in any format for about two years. Sure, the pursuit of this one hasn't approached the same sort of scale as the clamor for his acclaimed and mysteriously unavailable Barren Illusion but there are certainly a lot of people lusting after this one.
The sheer length of the wait for Loft has actually become something of a warning on this one. Kurosawa, after all, is a known quantity with a global fan base and the fact that the film couldn't find a home anywhere was enough to set some speculating as to why. There are some positive options, sure. Some films disappear thanks to ownership wrangles, other legal issues or a producer simply misreading the market and pricing themselves out of business entirely but, far more often, if you're a known film maker and you can't sell your movie it's probably because there's a problem with the film itself. Sadly, that is the case here. Loft has some stellar moments. For most of the the first half, in fact, it is vintage Kurosawa. But, as the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly evident that for all the flashes of brilliance this is one deeply flawed piece of work, a failed experiment by a film maker trying to broaden his palette while also remaining true to his roots.
Reiko is a young writer living in the big city, her early work hugely acclaimed by critics she is under immense pressure from her publisher to turn out something more audience -- and sales -- friendly for her next effort. Living alone and completely unsupported Reiko is not bearing up well under the pressure. She's behind schedule, badly blocked and unhappy with everything she writes. Making matters worse she has begun having strange coughing fits, hacking up puddles of thick, mucky goop for no reason that any doctor can find. Hoping to find some relief from the pressure and hoping that a change in scenery will do her good, Reiko convinces her publisher to find her a new place to write, some place off in the countryside, far removed from any distractions.
There, late at night, Reiko witnesses something strange. A man arrives at the building next door in a van, from which he unloads a bundle that appears menacingly body shaped and disappears silently inside. Curiosity gets the best of her and before too long Reiko meets her new neighbor, an archeologist -- Yoshioka -- who has spirited away the mummified remains of a woman preserved in a nearby bog for study away from his university. Perhaps recognizing each other as kindred spirits joined by their isolation Reiko and Yoshioka strike up a tentative relationship, one marked by a series of increasingly strange occurrences, dreams and Reiko's continuing coughing fits.
In the early going Loft is vintage Kurosawa, drawing from the same well as Seance, mingling the supernatural with the blandly domestic to great effect. Reiko's city life is completely, utterly barren, she lives a life of complete isolation -- a recurrent theme for Kurosawa -- and her attempts to find connection draw her further and further into a world of unexplainable phenomenon. Performances are restrained, the scares effective and some of the imagery -- one coughing fit in particular -- truly and deeply unsettling. Had Kurosawa chosen to play this one straight, to continue down the tried and true path, it would no doubt have been very well received. But he's not content with that. Like all auteurs Kurosawa returns compulsively to familiar themes, yes, but as has been made clear recently with both Doppelganger and Retribution he's not content to simply repeat himself, instead looking to find connections between seemingly isolated issues in his earlier work and also push his themes into new areas. Loft is an attempt at doing exactly this but, unfortunately, he just never finds a way of making his disparate themes work together, the film falling apart immediately -- and quite badly -- once he starts trying to work the romance in. Rather than the different parts working together to create something larger they work against each other and reduce the whole to a confused mess.
Much like the film itself this Malaysian DVD release -- to my knowledge the only English friendly edition anywhere in the world -- is rather disappointing. While the English translation and subtitles are more than serviceable the transfer is not. First, it is clearly taken from a video source rather than a digital one, and it appears to be a low grade video source at that. The image is notably soft. More critically it has been panned and scanned down to a 4:3 ratio. There's no excuse for either of these issues these days and the cropping is enormously damaging to a Kurosawa film. While Kurosawa will never likely be known for flashing a huge amount of visual style on the screen his compositions are meticulous and few people use space as well as he does to mirror the emotional state -- usually isolation -- of his characters. The crop job radically alters the composition of every single shot, in the process deeply damaging the content of the piece itself. It's tragic.
