A Japanese Filmmaker, Gripped With Existential Dread, Finally Gets His Due Stateside

The Japanese director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, recently had an American premiere of not one, but two of his films at the IFC Center this week. The 45-minute “Chime” (2024) is only a couple of years past its original release date, and will never, we are told, be released on a streaming platform. “Serpent’s Path” has taken a longer time to come to these shores, having been made in 1998. Francophiles might recognize the title: Mr. Kurosawa remade it in 2024.Cinefrance Studios made the director an offer he couldn’t refuse — rework one of your existing Japanese films inside France for a French audience. By that point in his career, Mr. Kurosawa had a number of films under his belt. His 1997 film “Cure” garnered rave reviews — it is now cited as a hallmark of the multidisciplinary category, “J-Horror,” and, presumably, was complete unto itself. Genre fans and cinephiles consider it highly.Could it be that Mr. Kurosawa’s first and sophomore features were deemed unsuitable for French tastes? Their titles alone, “Kandagawa Pervert Wars” (1983) and “The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl” (1985), are a lot to bear. Then again, there’s nothing particularly easy about the original “Serpent’s Path,” in being a grim tale of parental love, gangland revenge, and higher level mathematics. It’s a linear narrative given to selective shifts in time, and punctuated with tangents that are reminiscent of O. Henry.Not that Mr. Kurosawa has O. Henry’s flair for humor, though there is a gritty strain of black comedy underlying “Serpent’s Path.” None of its characters is without sin–with the notable exception of Emi (Ayami Oda), an 8-year old girl whose grisly death prompts her father, yakuza henchman, Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), to seek out her killer. He asks the help of a part-time math teacher and full-time psychopath, Najima (Shô Aikawa).With a pair of blocky glasses and too-cool-to-care demeanor, Najima could’ve stepped out of a post-war mob film by Seijun Suzuki or Takeshi Kitano–he’s less a character than an archetype. Miyashita, in contrast, is a nervous wreck: He enlists Najima’s help because he’s incapable of the kind of thuggery that is needed for the job, though, in the end, he does prove thuggish enough. Whenever the two gangsters capture a suspect for Emi’s murder, they chain up the man in an abandoned industrial space and subject him to a host of indignities.Their efforts to find the killer leads to the higher reaches of the yakuza in what ultimately becomes a kaleidoscopic foray into duplicity and murder. “Serpent’s Path” is not for the faint of heart though it is, in the end, less explicit in its violence than one might be led to believe. Masaki Tamura’s cinematography suffuses the proceedings in a cold anonymous light, and Mr. Kurosawa’s penchant for long takes doubles down on the workaday amorality of his characters. A rough nugget, this film, and something of an endurance test.“Chime” has a similar emotional register — tight-lipped and terse, but prone to bursts of mania — and plays out in a similar setting of ragtag back alleys. Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka, all sinew and stoicism) is an instructor at a school for chefs-in-training whose students are a stalwart lot with the exception of an awkward and disaffected Ichiro Toshiro (Seiichi Kohinata). Ichiro has a difficult time hewing to the instructor’s lessons because, he tells Matsuoka, there is a machine in his head making noise. His attempt to prove as much goes horribly awry. The nagging chime he’d been suffering from subsequently starts to wheedle its way through the student body, as well as the teacher.“Chime” intimates greater narrative and character complexities than its 45 minutes allow. As such, the story stops up short and the audience is left with a host of dangling incongruities. Mr. Kurosawa’s ability to sustain a sense of existential dread is impressive, but he does seem prone to arbitrary flirtations, as if poetry were a matter of purposeful evasions rather than carefully tendered ambiguities. Still, Mr. Kurosawa’s talent should not be considered lightly. A critic could do worse than peg him as a subject for further research.

A Japanese Filmmaker, Gripped With Existential Dread, Finally Gets His Due Stateside

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