Neo Sora is a Japanese film-maker who directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a documentary about his father, the renowned composer. Now he has made his feature debut with this complex, beguiling and often brilliant movie, co-produced by Anthony Chen; it manages to be part futurist satire, part coming-of-age dramedy, part high school dystopia. It combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If.… and there might even be a trace memory of Paul Schrader’s Mishima, only without the seppuku.
In a high school in Kobe in the future, students are oppressed by the reactionary xenophobia of their elders; periodic earthquake warnings, and actual earthquakes themselves, create a widespread air of suppressed panic which the authorities believe justifies a perpetual clampdown. The prime minister has taken to claiming that undesirable elements are taking advantage of the earthquakes to indulge in lawlessness. In the school, there is an almost unconcealed racist disdain for students who are not fully ethnic Japanese as well as those who have unorthodox or rebellious views.
One morning, the principal (Shirô Sano) is infuriated to see that some prankster has turned his shiny new yellow car up on its end in the school grounds, like a Stonehenge monolith. With some reason, he suspects the school’s cool-kid gang of rebels who, encouraged by liberal teacher Mr Okada (Ayumu Nakajima), have been allowed to hang out together in the “music research room”. They are Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), Fumi (Kilala Inori), Korean-Japanese Kou (Yukito Hidaka), Chinese student Ming (Shina Peng), African-American student Tom (Arazi) (who plans on joining his family in Detroit on graduation), and nerdy Ata-chan (Yûta Hayashi).
However the glowering principal can’t prove anything, and the film itself does not show exactly who did this stunt or how on earth they managed it. But in a spiteful and retaliatory spirit he installs a video surveillance and face-recognition system in the school, brand-named Panopty (clearly after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design) which spies on the students’ every move. This Orwellian setup creates a massive dysfunction in the school, like a collective nervous breakdown, perhaps especially for Yuta and Kou, for whom the school’s calamitous loss of privacy perhaps means that, even as they heroically challenge this new oppression, they cannot acknowledge their feelings for each other.
This is a movie that refuses to give us clear storylines, clear characterisations, clear meanings; even the fierce principal himself might not be quite so strict as all that. It’s a very stylish, thoughtful, heartfelt movie in which regular teen heartbreak might be quite as important as any political commentary.