There are no monsters in ‘Monster‘, Hirokazu Koreeda‘s latest film and the first shot in Japan after a five-year absence and two films made in France and Korea that I personally liked, but many other cinema fans liked less. It is not a horror film either, but rather a combination of a family drama with social cinema, based on an original screenplay written by Yûji Sakamoto. The subject is an incident that takes place in a school involving 5th graders and their teacher.
Yûji Sakamoto and Hirokazu Koreeda use a technique here that is not entirely new – in fact, one of the famous precedents is found in the history of Japanese cinema and gave its name to the Rashomon effect, as in Akiro Kurosawa’s famous 1950 film. Hirokazu Koreeda expanded and improved this technique where different perspectives and points of view of the same events are described by different characters. In “Monster“, with each of the three iterations of the story, we not only learn more and change perspectives, but also gain a deeper understanding of the heroes and what they stand for.
Saori is the single mother of Hinato, a 5th grader. When the signs of a conflict at school appear – changes in behavior but also signs of physical violence – the mother addresses the school management. In her own way, Saori is an exemplary mother, but the child does not communicate much, and the interaction with the school principal and teachers does not work either. The school principal is a grieving grandmother who also has her own problems. In fact, the theme of the first part of the film seemed to be exactly this impossibility to communicate – due to age, due to the formality of teacher-parent relationships or simply the difficulties of communication in a society that avoids direct expression and camouflages it behind ceremonial rules of politeness. The source of the trouble seems to be a young teacher named Hori. He is forced by the principal to apologize, and is then expelled from school only to reappear under strange circumstances. Hinato also has a friend in class, but what is the true nature of their relationship? The second part of the story is told from Professor Hori’s perspective, while the third part brings to the fore the relationship between the two children. When we reach the end the perspective is completely changed. The judgments and assumptions made in the first part turn out to have been largely wrong.
Hirokazu Koreeda seems to be telling us that in the absence of communication, good intentions are not enough. There is no lack of love between the heroes in this film, but neither the mother knows her son well enough, nor the student’s teacher. The much praised and appreciated Japanese ceremonial politeness seems here to be the main object of criticism of the director and screenwriter. Only the two kids, still uncorrupted by the language and manners of adults, manage to make their feelings felt to each other, with few words and more with gestures and joint activities – what we adults call play. As always with Koreeda, the casting is perfect and the focus is on the humanity of the characters. Nature also plays its part. The story in the film is placed between two dramatic events that disturb the calm of a picturesque town located on the edge of a lake: a fire at the beginning, a typhoon that produces landslides at the end. Between them the characters live their dramas. Beautifully filmed and with a soundtrack very well suited to the story, interestingly written and full of humanity and sensitivity, ‘Monster‘ is one of the best films I have seen in recent months.