Interview with Satoshi Isaka on Detective Riko
1999; Issue: 48 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoNew Beat of Japan, this year's Toronto International Film Festival national cinema programme, showcased seventeen feature films produced in the 1990s. Of the eight I saw, I was very impressed by Tetsuya Nakashima's Happy Go Lucky (1995) and Beautiful Sunday (1998), but it was Satoshi Isaka's Detective Riko (1997) that struck me as an unique and exciting discovery. I admire the film's discipline, intelligence and visual grace; it is one of the few films I have seen recently that truly deserves to be called elegant. What is unexpected considering its formal beauty is that Detective Riko, is a genre film. Detective Riko, as the title suggests, is a crime-police drama but with a differences -- Riko is a single mother with a two-year-old son. The child's father is a colleague whose wife, to whom he is committed, is dying. Riko has an ambivalent attitude towards her lover and their relationship and is primarily concentrating on doing her utmost to maintain her professional life and be a good mother. Detective Riko is in equal measure a character study and a police/detective film; while not avoiding explicit violence, the film refuses to fulfill the generic demand that violence be central to the narrative. Detective Riko, as far as I know, has really no precedent in the Japanese cinema. Perhaps the closest equivalents are Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman (1987) and A Taxing Woman's Return (1988) but these works employ a very different strategy presenting the woman as a kind of comic `superhero' who, because of her determination and cunning, succeeds in defeating masculine aggression and social injustice; unlike Riko, she is unencumbered either by parenthood or romantic involvement, permitting the tone of the film to be predominantly comic. The films aren't intended to be read as `realist' works in regard to everyday life; rather, they encourage fantasy or at least a larger-than-life vision of the heroine's accomplishments. In the Hollywood cinema, there have been various attempts in the 1990s to reinvent the crime film/ detective genre from a woman's perspective. Arguably, these films owe a debt to 1980s women's detective fiction of which the most distinguished examples are Sara Paretsky's novels, featuring V.I. Warshawski as a female detective who is clearly modeled on the male private eye image developed in 1930s fiction by writers such as Raymond Chandler. Although V.I. Warshawski isn't simply a male in drag, the novels tend to preserve the traditional characteristics of the private eye as a hard-drinking, tough-talking loner who exists somewhere between being a representative of legal justice and an outsider to the social system. Jeff Kanew's V.I. Warshawski (1991), starring Kathleen Turner in the title role, was totally unsuccessful in translating Paretsky's heroine into a filmic creation; in fact, the film's commercial and artistic failure seems to have discouraged other fimmakers from trying to transpose any of the highly popular quasi-feminist female detective figures found in contemporary genre literature into the film medium. Although departing from the detective/private eye formula, there have been several commercially and critically successful films which presented women as law/authority figures. Jonathan Demme's dramatic The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Joel Coen's comic Fargo (1996) manage to integrate their respective heroines into the story line but in both films extreme violence is used to sustain the narrative movement. Although the violence doesn't displace the heroine's centrality, these works are primarily defined by their generic conventions. Similarly, Jon Amiel's Copycat (1995), which has two heroines, relies heavily on the presence of its serial killer villain to give the film definition. A somewhat different approach to the crime/detective genre in light of feminist thinking is Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). While an ambitious effort and fitfully successful in dramatizing its gender concerns, the film never seems to be sure whether it wants to parody the genre itself using its female lead character as part of the send-up or present Geena Davis as a woman whom the audience should take seriously as she, in the context of a melodramatic action narrative, struggles to reconcile her identity as a high-powered government agent who has been programmed as a killing machine with that of a mother. …
Referência(s)