Sorasoi — movie review
Note: Sorasoi is only in town for a few more days, so I’m going to make this as brief as possible.
Following the success of Funky Forest, Katsuhito Ishii and school friends, ANIKI (aka: Hajime Ishimine) and Shunichiro Miki, have reunited to create one of the most enjoyable films of the year. Standing in direct contrast to Funky Forest’s big-budget, big studio scripted madness, Sorasoi sees the trio going the indie film route, with a low budget exercise in cinema verite. Featuring a cast of unknowns and a largely improvised script, Sorasoi documents a young woman’s summer at a seasonal hostel (The Sorasoi of the title) and her budding friendship with the hostel’s other guests: a group of dance enthusiasts practicing for a national competition. The material is more a slice of life than structured narrative, making it hard to summarize, but you can rest assured the the events depicted carry just as much weight as your engineered crowd pleasers.
While something of a common exercise in 60’s New Wave cinema, cinema verite techniques seem all but forgotten these days. At best you have something that’s slick and self-conscious (ie: Battlestar Galactica), not quite the documentation of a pseudo reality the old-guard of verite purported. However, with Sorasoi (and last year’s Compound Eye), the old way of doing things is demonstrated to still be quite possible.
In constructing the film’s narrative, Ishii and co. would merely set up a goal for a scene and one or two lines as guideposts. The actors would then fill in the rest of the sequence from their personal experience or their interpretation of their character. Actors were free to come up with their own responses to stimulus, their own affinities for other characters, and through this create interactions that are magnetic, moving, and real. Through all this, Soraroi manages to explore themes of summertime romance, unrequited love, self discovery, the realization of ambition, perseverance in the face of self doubt, and other topics that, through the documentary sensibility and conviction of the performances, manage to avoid the pitfalls of cliché (or the perception thereof), and instead become something akin to a video diary, intimate and earnest.
But lest I make the picture sound too serious, let it be known that there is a fair amount of comedy to be seen. There are the trademark Ishii asides, with characters engaged in oddball dialogs about oddball things (ie: the proper way to slap your sides with your elbows in a way that will entice the ladies, complete with demonstrations), near vaudevillian misunderstandings and related cover-ups, some good-natured sexual humor (and related awkwardness), and, of course, the film’s awesome choreographed dance sequence. Many of these had me laughing hard enough that I heard my voice echo throughout the theater.
I apologize here for being somewhat vague, but I believe that Sorasoi is something to be witnessed rather than explained away (plus, I have to preserve the jokes). Sorasoi’s stay in San Francisco is exceedingly short, so if you are interested, you should do your best to see it as soon as possible. Sorasoi is one of my favorite films this year, and one of my favorite efforts of Ishii’s to date. Go see it.
Sorasoi will be screening at Japantown’s Viz cinema until Thursday, October 1st. Check out New People’s website for a schedule of screenings.
Some bonus film facts from the post-screening QA (We also have pics and video. I hope to get a subsequent article up shortly):
- Sorasoi was filmed in the same locations as Funky Forest. The residents of the town were so receptive and accomodating to the Funky Forest team, they figured they’d shoot Sorasoi there as well.
- Director Aniki is using the cast of Sorasoi for an indie sci-fi adventure (I don’t see an entry on IMDB for it yet, so I’m not sure what this is/will be called)
- The word “Sorasoi” doesn’t mean anything. Ishii just liked the way it sounded.
Sorasoi trailer
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