Akihiko Shiota - Gaichu AKA Harmful Insect (2001)-Cinema of the World

10:28 AM

Akihiko Shiota - Gaichu AKA Harmful Insect (2001)

Gönderen anybody

This is a wonderful and strange little Japanese drama that was overlooked at the time of its release. Though it was adored by the critics that saw it, much of the distribution attention was lavished on other Japanese films made around the same time, like Eureka and All About Lily Chou-Chou. But Harmful Insect is something else entirely -- quiet, brooding, cold but intimate, elliptical yet rigorously structured. It also features some very lovely acting, especially from Aoi Miyazaki in an almost wordless performance. Film critic Michael Sicinski named it the #1 film of 2002, and here's what he had to say:

As the cruel vagaries of international film distribution inexplicably iced out this film, I am sad to have only been able to see it once. While I was a fan of Shiota's previous film Sasayaki, Insect was the sign of an auteur making a watershed, decisively breaking through to another level. But almost no one noticed. Shiota deploys a style which combines the pictorialism of Imamura with the almost architectural visual control of Tsai Ming-liang, but these comparisons also fail, because he is derivative of neither. The story of the accelerated emotional destruction of Japanese schoolgirl Sachiko (the fantastic Aoi Miyazaki) at the hands of callous or predatory adults, Shiota foregoes the swooning or finger-wagging of others who've mined this vein, in favor of a relentless objectivity. He is not, however, using aesthetics to seal us off from this world, as if to underscore its fated inevitability. He's just reminding us that, if we pay close attention, we are sitting right in front of this type of degradation everyday. This is not, however, a Solondzesque roll in the sleaze. Shiota seems to agree with Renoir, that "everyone has their reasons." It's just that they simply aren't good enough.

--Bressoniac

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Quote:

Akihiko Shiota - She is a very sad young girl and this sadness lies in the fact that, as you say, she is forced to become an adult. Maybe when you see her in this film, you think she is very strong and she is very close to being an adult. She's becoming an adult, so she certainly has a kind of strength that's unusual in people who are so young. But I think that she is actually a very weak young girl who is hiding all her weak points. She tries not to show them to others.

Also, she doesn't speak so much because words always come from feelings. If she speaks only one phrase, her feelings come out and she wouldn't be able to stop that feeling which she has kept hidden deep inside her. If she would speak and express her feelings, the result would only be more sadness and despair. She wants to keep everything inside, so there's a gap between how she looks on the outside, her coolness in dealing with things like an adult, and what she actually thinks and feels inside her, which is a great confusion. This gap grows wider and wider, and when it becomes too wide what results is a kind of explosion.

Midnight Eye interview