Karisuma, 1999
[Charisma]
Charisma
opens to an apparently familiar pattern of an overworked, rumpled,
and unfocused officer named Goro Yabuike (Koji Yakusho) napping on
an empty bench at police headquarters and being awakened by a superior
officer to discuss the progress of his arrest case. One day, he is
called to an abandoned house in the countryside in order to diffuse
a hostage situation involving a prominent parliamentary official.
As Yabuike enters the room, a lone, apprehensive gunman hands him
a scrap of paper with a single demand to "restore the rules of
the world", before fumbling and dropping his gun on the floor.
Yabuike instinctively draws his weapon and aims at the now unarmed
suspect, but decides not to shoot and instead, retreats to deliver
the cryptic and unrealistic demand. The hesitation would prove costly,
as the gunman impulsively kills the official without warning, and
the police immediately retaliate and open fire. When asked about his
missed opportunity to shoot, Yabuike responds "I thought at the
time that they both deserved help." Placed on suspended duty
for the botched hostage rescue, the aimless and guilt-ridden Yabuike
is left on a stretch of road by a remote, barren forest populated
by carcinogenic plants, polluted streams, and sickly, collapsing trees.
He encounters a team of forest rangers headed by a radical named Kirayama
(Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) who brings him to an open field in order to take
photographs of an unusual, forbidding, and oddly decorated tree, before
being chased away by the tree's eccentric caretaker, Nakasone (Ren
Osugi). Yabuike learns that Nakasone resides in an abandoned sanitarium
where he has assumed guardianship for the tree, called Charisma, since
the facility director's passing three years earlier, and has been
Charisma's sole protector against opportunistic poachers like Kirayama
who attempt to profit from its rarity. However, Yabuike soon learns
that Charisma's rarity may come at an ecological price when a botanist
named Jinbo (Jun Fubuki) argues that the roots of the tree expel a
toxic substance, and must be destroyed in order to restore the natural
balance. As Kirayama, Nakasone, and Jinbo wage a selfish and increasingly
destructive feud over the fate of Charisma, can Yabuike find a mutual
solution for the coexistence of the strange tree and the viability
of the forest?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa presents a visually compelling, multi-layered, and
insightful film on radicalism, individuality, and balance in Charisma.
Evoking the austere landscapes of Andrei
Tarkovsky, Kurosawa similarly explores issues of conscience, spiritual
longing, and personal disharmony through the manifestation of a metaphoric
environmental malady. Using foggy, pale, and muted colors of the barren
wilderness, decaying interiors to reflect psychological distress,
and medium and long shots that frame each character in proper relation
to his environment, Kurosawa raises contemporary issues on the value
and quality of life in an increasingly polarized and uncompromising
world, the dilemma between individual rights and social order, and
the laws of natural selection versus human intervention against extinction.
Inevitably, as the conflicting ideologies struggle between natural
and created order, what emerges is an oppressive, alienating, and
ominous wasteland of irreconcilable and consuming intolerance.
© Acquarello 2002. All rights reserved.
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An
unassuming man in a plaid sport coat walks with a confident gait through
the streets and removes a section of pipe from an exposed water line
in a tunnel. The scene cuts to a shot of the same man calmly pacing
the floor of an anonymous hotel room with a drink in hand before inexplicably
bludgeoning his companion, then subsequently bathing, his clothes
neatly folded and arranged on the sink cabinet. Police inspector Takabe
(Koji Yakusho) investigates the grisly crime scene and notes that
the carotid arteries of the victim were neatly severed, forming an
'X' mark on the woman's neck. However, the disquieting precision of
the seemingly calculated murder is negated by the killer's apparent
clumsiness in leaving identifiable personal items in the room, and
he is immediately apprehended. Meanwhile, on the idyllic coastline
of Shirasato, an enigmatic drifter (Masato Hagiwara) approaches a
teacher named Hanaoka studying on the beach and casually asks where
he is. Moments later, the disoriented young man returns and repeats
his question, before explaining his amnesiac condition and asking
for help. The well-intentioned Hanaoka brings the drifter home in
an attempt to aid the young man in determining his identity. The young
man's overcoat indicates that his name is Mamiya, but his memory proves
to be impenetrable, and is unable to confirm the information. Instead,
Mamiya spends an uneventful evening repeatedly asking Hanaoka the
same seemingly innocuous questions. The following day, Hanaoka's wife,
Tomoko, is found dead with the familiar signature 'X' on her neck,
and the distraught and guilt-ridden teacher attempts suicide by crashing
through the window of their home. But is there a common element to
the seemingly random, yet intrinsically connected murders beyond each
atypical killer's inexplicably fatal compulsion?
A
solitary young woman stands on the deck of a near empty ship, staring
out into the ominous sea, and solemnly recounts a seemingly ordinary
day in a Tokyo botanical nursery when a young man named Taguchi
(Kenji Mizuhashi) failed to return to the office after working from
home on a software project. Concerned about Taguchi's extended absence,
his colleague Michi (Kumiko Aso) pays an unannounced visit in order
to check on his health and retrieve the project disc, and encounters
the disheveled and evasive Taguchi retreating to the back room of
his apartment after fetching a length of rope to complete a task
in an obscured, secluded corner of an adjoining room. After a prolonged
silence, Michi searches for the reticent Taguchi and discovers that
he has committed suicide during the course of their polite conversation.
Soon, the co-workers begin to experience unexplainable technical
anomalies: a tunnel image of Taguchi staring into a real-time webcast
of his apartment found embedded in a project file; intermittent
disruptions on Michi's television reception; a disembodied voice
pleading for help on Yabe's (Masatoshi Matsuo) cellular telephone.
Meanwhile, an economics student named Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô)
has logged into an insidious website that purports to feature an
encounter with ghosts, and is presented with a series of bizarre
images of anonymous people in despair. Curiously, as Taguchi's other
colleagues, Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) and Junco (Kurume Arisaka),
attempt to reconcile with the senselessness his death, they begin
to exhibit unusual behavioral patterns similar to the strange affliction
that inevitably consumed him.
An aimless, twenty-something man,
Yuji Nimura (Joe Odagiri), bides his idle time at a local video arcade
as he reflects off-camera in a solemn voice of recurring visions for
a bright future that once filled his unconscious hours of sleep until
recently when, suddenly and inexplicably, the pleasant dreams ceased.
Volatile and asocial (where the size of the chicken pieces in his bento
box is invariably grounds for an unprovoked fight) Yuji's only friend
is the equally unambitious and directionless Mamoru Arita (Tadanobu Asano),
an outwardly carefree co-worker whose one prized possession - and sole
preoccupation - is the care and re-acclimation of a translucent and
strangely entrancing, but dangerously poisonous saltwater red jellyfish.
Their supervisor, a middle-aged man named Mr. Fujiwara (Takashi Sasano),
takes advantage of the docile and seemingly acquiescent employees,
inviting them into his home for dinner and, more importantly, to deliver
his daughter's oversized wooden desk to an upstairs room at the house.
Nevertheless, despite his dubious invitation, Fujiwara seems genuinely
concerned with the welfare and plight of the unmotivated young men,
offering them a salary bonus and an opportunity to become full-time,
permanent employees at the factory - a chance for job stability and
a higher level of responsibility that the reluctant friends meet with
ambivalence and concern. But as the sociable Fujiwara begins to insinuate
himself into their empty, withdrawn lives, Yuji and Mamoru's surfacing
resentment towards their intrusive employer leads to a reckless act
of impassivity that irreparably damages their fostering relationship
with their well-intentioned employer.