Eureka

After being welcomed so dearly by my web host of doom and by my blogging idol I definitely feel the urge to write something. Because I have watched the Japanese arthouse flick “Eureka” yesterday, I naturally am going to write about that one.
The movie begins quite confusingly, with the phrase “A tidal wave is coming.” But shortly after this prologue the most actionful and most exciting scenes of the whole film begin to develop. The daily lifes of the protagonists are destroyed in one day, by something you could symbolically call a “tidal wave”. Almost three extremely slow-paced hours of reconditioning follow. These three hours (which were even longer in my case, since my computer crashed regularly) may become boring after a while, but if they weren’t and if the director Shinji Aoyama hadn’t decided for this length, the film wouldn’t be as impressing as it actually is.
The actors of the children don’t really have the chance to show their talent, because in the first two hours they are nothing but “the apathetic kids” and playing an apathetic person doesn’t really need talent IMO. On the other hand Kôji Yakusho has a role that he plays as good as nobody else could. When he coughs withouth interruption in the last third of the film, I almost wanted to cough myself. His acting is infectious.
The cinematography is probably the most exciting aspect of Eureka. The story may get boring after a while, but if you’re bored with the story, you can simply marvel at the astonishing images, mostly landscapes (*___*). Aoyama’s use of the camera could be compared to Andrei Tarkovsky (”Stalker”), who uses long takes in a similar way. I also liked that the film is kept in sepia colours, which underscores the depressing mood.
In my opinion the end is a bit too optimistic and unrealistic, although you - of course - can’t let a film like this one, which concentrates on the long and hard healing process of traumatised people, end pessimistically.
Writing about Eureka concurs with a certain impossibility of being satisfied with your text, because nobody (except for Aoyama himself) can be able to describe the visual impact and the emotional depth of this movie. The story and the direction are just too bulky. As long as you haven’t been the victim of a really traumatic experience (”really” being the operative word), you can’t understand the actions of this film’s protagonists. They act irrationally. They live isolated lives inmidst of people who can’t understand why they do. And they have the most gruesome nightmares due to feelings of guilt. I don’t know if the director himself actually has experienced a trauma like that, but I read somewhere that he created the story as a result to the bombings of the Aum sect in Tokyo in 1995 - so at least the society he lives in has.
Haruki Murakami is the most famous Japanese author in the Western world these days. It’s obvious why - he writes stories that describe modern (romantic) life of men in big cities. And the love life of a man in Tokyo is probably pretty similar to the one of a man in Berlin or New York. Well, even I could identify with a 15 year old Murakami character, when I was 15, although I was living (and still am…) in the tiniest village you can imagine. *cough*
- *This* satisfying melody concurring with *those* lyrics. ” I’ll take the quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide”
- Just look at the somewhat esoteric 