Review for Ryo Nakajima's 'This World of Ours' ('Oretachi No Sekai' 2007).

Debut drama from new filmmaker Ryo Nakajima, 'This World of Ours' is a recent PIA Film Festival winner and a film showing soon in Vancouver. Confident, original, and incredibly solid, the director himself sent me a disc from which I was able to watch the film in recent days - here is a film that's as impressive as I could imagine being able to catch, and one from which I hope a great many regular names appear in future projects, most obviously Nakajima himself.

Nakajima's a young man (born in 1984) who is emerging from self-imposed isolation, determined to share his thoughts and extrapolate an hypothesis in an objective manner in relation to the transition between childhood and adulthood. With particular attention paid to Japanese youth, but with universality in mind or embodied inadvertently, there's a story here of a group of people caught between incarnations of themselves as they are now and society as they each perceive it. What they may or may not manage to become and what influences the outcome in terms of personal efforts, accidental or ill-considered behaviour, and outside forces remains what Nakajima chooses to discuss as he emerges from a similar situation himself. By creating a series of characters not too overwhelmed by his personal past, but instead gestated from one part of his mind into greater representations built upon it, Nakajima can largely manage to give an individual voice and remain open to giving perspectives for a variety of viewers to build from; particularly with the apparently eponymous Ryo, the sociopathic rebel (Okutsu Satoshi) who wants to change the world by force, and more centrally with Hiroki, the more realistic character relatively clouded by commonplace delusions and insecurities as to being so concerned as to confuse his own clarity of judgment that makes for the main strongest thread of the narrative (and a stunning stand-out performance too, for me), to a young girl who hides her insecurities and self-harm behind manipulative games played with other peoples lives.

Similarly to Akihiko Shiota's 'Kanaria' ('Canary', 2005), Nakajima talks about the desire to change or master existence, how it maintains a certain amount that's not open for change and remains whatever dressing you give to life. Starting with wild-living youth represented in tones familiar to lovers of gentle-but-brutal dramas as have found much praise outside of Japan - Toshiaki Toyoda's rebelious sympathies are found in certain amounts here, as is the creaping dread that more strongly underlies the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the sense of landscape is somewhat similar too - and gradually pulling the narrative from relative disarray, disjointed sequences, into a whole which begins to directly approach the ideas of society not being an entity that can be overpowered or mastered, but instead a collection of individuals who must each face the lack of complete control they have in order to gain from their lives a certain amount of compromised balance and personal pleasure.

Central to this, there's a couple of miniature monologues which feel a little obviously placed and scripted, most importantly from Hiroki's visiting cousin - a thirty-something traveller who does casual labour to support his freedom - who states it's people's own aims to fit it, their pride to fulfill their own general preconcieved ideas of what society expects from them, that ultimately leads them to suffer from a lack of control and individuality, to descend into a collapse of one kind or another as they attempt to come to terms and follow through with their own personal choice. Be this rebellion (Ryo fancies the idea of changing society to suit him through an integrated discussion on terrorism), or be this falling into a role that could swallow you whole by a young persons standards, or be this finding that compromise is necessary in any choice of path, this is something of the point of the films discussed ideas. As a achievement in filmmaking, there's clearly an astonishing confidence and resulting solidity to the way the film rises above the potential to fall into cliche or amateurish result, Nakajima both showing relative connection to common or familiar approaches in the relaxed and minimalist tones of film drama in Japan, and a very individual sense of structuring - key to this is the initially choppy editing which slices things unexpectedly brief for much of the time to great effect, and again this is Nakajima editing his own film very skillfully - which at once makes it easy to interpret enough for it to not be taking a pretentious tone, and yet also gives it a distinct identity enough to warrant fascination with where he might next take his story.

Performances from his reasonably large cast are incredibly naturalistic and assured, the dialogue delivered solidly in a way which hints at a certain amount of hefty preparation and of finding the right moment to shoot certain scenes, to the extent that there's a completeness to the overall picture which is beyond finance and experience, and firmly into the realms of natural talent. It's a film that's as impressive a debut as I could hope to experience, and contains so much to warrant praise that it's worth remembering it's not just an impressive project bourn of difficult circumstances due to the challenges of completing any such project, but one which simply shows there's a higher level of ability here than can be developed within a filmmaker by course of tutoring, learning, or experience. 'This World of Ours' ( 'Oretachi No Sekai', 『俺たちの世界』 ), a film which Ryo Nakajima is providing English-Subtitled screener DVDs of in hope of finding foreign homes for his work, was one of three films to win a Special Jury Award (as well as two other awards) at PIA Film Festivel this year; Tadanobu Asano, Norifumi Suzuki, Hiroyuki Negishi, artist Tatsuya Ishii and manga artist Sakumi Yoshino made up the jury in part. You can also catch the film at the upcoming Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27th - October 12th 2007), and I sincerely hope many people do just that.

'This World of Ours' English Subtitled Trailer at YouTube.
'This World of Ours' Bilingual Website; through which prospective licensees can contact director Ryo Nakajima.