Monster movie review.
Hirokazu Yae's new film Monster won the Best Screenplay Award and the Kool-Aid Palm Pilot Award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and has been half-jokingly dubbed the East Asian version of Intimacy by some of the fans who have seen it. Coincidentally, the director of "Intimacy", Lucas DeHotte, is the previous winner of the Kool-Aid Palm Pilot Award.
Thematically and in terms of content, Monster also depicts the sincere and simple same-sex friendship between two boys. Especially in the end credits of Monster and the beginning of Intimacy, the two directors coincidentally chose to use a steady panning of the camera to witness the two boys' desire and pursuit of pure emotion.
The difference is that what Yukihiro Yae/Yuji Sakamoto tries to achieve or realize in Monster is more involved - on a socio-institutional level - and more ambitious than DeHot, which focuses on the boys' psychological and emotional claustrophobia.
Monster opens with a high-rise fire, and screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto adopts a Rashomon style structure with multiple points of emphasis: Sakura Ando's single "mom" Hayori, Eita Nagayama's Paulie "teacher," two "boys" Maikumo, and the boy Maikumo, and the boy Maikumo, and the boy Maikumo. "The three perspectives of Hayori, played by Sakura Ando as the single mother, Eita Nagayama as Paulie's teacher, and the two boys, Minato Makino (Yasuya Kurokawa) and Iri Hoshikawa (Yota Shuuki), make up the film's three-act drama that is independent of each other, but interconnected with each other. The "incident" that breaks the peace and quiet of their lives and creates an uproar is a number of school conflicts that are suspected to be bullying.
The second act ends when Mr. Pauli overhears Maino and Hoshikawa's secret and, remorseful for wrongly accusing his student of being a bully, goes to Maino's house to apologize, but the two boys are nowhere to be found in the middle of a storm.
As for the two questions that haunt the audience - who is the monster? What happened between the two men? --are also explained in the final scene.
Therefore, unlike DeHotte's approach of dissecting the boys' hearts at the beginning of Intimacy, the narrative strategy adopted by Hirokazu Yae/Yuji Sakamoto is to start from the "adult point of view" represented by the mother and the teacher before returning the main point of view to the two boys, and then to depict the cold, sinister, complex and guilt-free world of the adults - the "monsters" of Japanese society - as a counterpoint to the innocent and harmless utopia of the final scene, where Maio and Hoshikawa often hang out in the countryside, and where no one bears the blame.
Before returning the main point of view to the two boys, it is necessary to depict the cold, sinister, complex, and unaccountable world of the adults - the so-called "monsters" of Japanese society - as a counterpoint to the innocent and harmless utopia of the finale, the deserted buses in the countryside, where Maino and Hoshikawa often hang out.
The bus is deserted.