NB skip the italicised synopsis to avoid spoilers.
The Kobayashi family fulfils a long-standing ambition by moving into a two-storey, three-bedroom suburban house. While his son Masaki studies hard for university entrance exams, his daughter Erika rehearses for a possible record company audition, and his wife Saeko busies herself running the household, breadwinner Katsuhiko submits to a gruelling daily round of commuting, work and exercise. The apparent idyll is disrupted when Katsuhiko’s elderly father Yasukuni arrives for a visit and outstays his welcome. Katsuhiko privately begins to worry about a return of “the sickness” to the family. Goaded by the women’s complaints, Yasukuni is preparing to leave when Katsuhiko has the idea of digging a cellar for him under the living-room. He attacks the floor with saws and axes, assuring his horrified family that the cellar will also serve as a fall-out shelter. Soon armed with power tools and increasingly obsessed, Katsuhiko works day and night on the excavation, forgetting his office job and oblivious to the effect on the others in the house. Masaki becomes a zombie recluse, immersed in esoteric revision; neglect drives Saeko into frenzies of frustration; Erika throws tantrums in her room. Katsuhiko presses on until he strikes a nest of white ants and diverts all his energies to the task of exterminating them. He tries to go back to his job, but the thought of white ants haunts him and he is soon back in the living-room cavity – where he ruptures a water main. Hysteria grips the house and Erika attempts suicide. During the night, Katsuhiko barricades the doors and windows to keep everyone in and tries to trick the family into a group suicide. When this fails, Katsuhiko goes on a would-be murderous rampage and the family turn on each other. Next morning, Saeko prepares breakfast as usual. Katsuhiko is ominously silent until another idea strikes him: they must demolish the house so that they can make a fresh start. Everyone but Erika enthusiastically pitches in, and they leave the house as it collapses. Some time later, all five members of the Kobayashi family are living happily in the wide open space between two motorway flyovers…
“Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People and The Family Game are all admirable films dealing with family problems. They are serious films, much praised by critics, and some people regard them as masterpieces. But some of us think differently. We consider them timid films, more or less like the TV family dramas made for middle-aged audiences, and the critics like them more than we do. And so Sogo Ishii and I decided to make a more radical film on the same subject. We wanted a film about the family that would be filled with fun and poison… There are four things that traditionally frighten the Japanese: earthquakes, thunder, fire and fathers. This list is as valid now as it ever was”.
Co-writer Yoshinori Kobayashi’s comments explain clearly enough where Gyakufunsha Kazoku is coming from (although the joke of bracketing Morita’s subversive Family Game with the two American films may be less apparent here than it is in Japan), but nothing could fully prepare any audience for the way it moves or the final direction it takes. Sogo Ishii’s film is a live-action comic strip, each sequence shattered into component images like panels on a page and edited to rock rhythms. The stylistic attack is matched, blow for blow, by the ruthlessness and cruelty of the humour: satire, slapstick, pain and black comedy are primary elements, but the film goes beyond them all into an area harder and more vicious than anything seen on screen since the early days of Monty Python. Its triumph is that it is (a) consistently funny, and (b) sustained as a narrative, rather than collapsing into a series of sketches. And the bizarre, ‘visionary’ ending (reached by way of a ‘special visual effects’ sequence created by the brilliant avant-garde structuralist film-maker Takashi Ito) is at once a serenely logical extension of the premises of the storyline and a twist that retrospectively gives a science-fiction gloss to the whole proceedings.
At the risk of hammering the jokes into the ground, it should be pointed out that the film’s humour springs from two central paradoxes. First, the proposition that the family’s hard-working, selfless, long suffering breadwinner is actually a seething mass of paranoia, haunted by the ‘imperial’ past (in the person of his senile father) and unshakeably convinced that there is a deep rooted ‘sickness’ in his family that only his love can cure. Second, the proposition that a family would destroy its own house in the name of saving it from attack by white ants (which represent Japan’s version of dry rot and are not, as might be imagined, monsters dreamed up by the scriptwriters). A Japanese audience is alerted to these paradoxes by the title, which translates literally as “The Back-Jet Family”. The reference is to an incident that occurred at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the early 1980s. A pilot named Katagiri was about to land a JAL airliner at the end of a short, internal flight. At the crucial moment, he fired the plane’s back jet, causing the aircraft to crash and killing many of the passengers. Pressure of work was blamed for Katagiri-san’s crack-up.
These paradoxes clear the way for the film to tackle its prime targets: the masochism of male students who willingly submit to cramming for exams; the vacuousness of the ‘interests’ that teenage girls are encouraged to pursue; the stereotype of suburban wives as barely repressed Mata Haris; the matching stereotype of suburban husbands as timorous creatures brought out in hot sweats by any sexual proposition; and the general notion of the Japanese nuclear family as an ad-fed unit that literally has no space to accommodate its grandparents, no matter how large its impeccably crafted house. Every one of these is gleefully pushed to an extreme, and the ‘saving grace’ of irony is completely absent. The film also represents a major step forward for Sogo Ishii, whose previous features - Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and Bakuretsu Toshi (Burst City, 1982) – were anarchic fantasies about neo-fascists, bike gangs, urban breakdown and mass sodomy conspicuously lacking in aesthetic judgment and control. Ishii (now approaching his twenty-ninth birthday) has this time gathered a team of outstanding collaborators – including the cinematographer Masaki Tamura, who also shot Fire Festival – and come up with a film that not only means business but also delivers. He has also had the wit to rescue Hitoshi Ueki from the oblivion of Japanese TV by casting him as the appalling grandfather, a role that deliberately evokes his
’60s heyday in the Irresponsible film series.
Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns’ new book Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema will be published in 2024.
This article was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan 1, 1986. Re-published here by very kind permission of Sight and Sound.
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