Cannes 2023: Three points of view, one truth? A magnificent monster follows in the footsteps of a master of Japanese cinema

what are you talking about

Young Minato’s behavior is becoming more and more disturbing. A mother who is raising him alone after the death of her husband decides to confront the educational team at her son’s school. Everything seemed to point to Minato’s teacher as the one responsible for the problems the young boy was facing.

But as the story unfolds through the eyes of a mother, a teacher and a child, the truth turns out to be far more complex and nuanced than anyone initially expected…

Monster emotion

Rashomon. When he introduced Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new feature at the press conference announcing the selection for the 76th Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Fremaux dropped one of the most telling messages for moviegoers. From those who don’t need an explanation and even gave an expression.

Released in French cinemas in 1952, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon allows us to see the same event from different angles, both complementary and contradictory, leaving the audience to find for themselves what seems true. A masterpiece in the making “The Rashomon Effect”One of the most recent users of which is Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel.

Until this monster, thanks to which the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda, who is fighting for his second Palme d’Or five years after the family affair, is walking in the footsteps of his compatriot Akira Kurosawa. Because the story, in three acts, moves successively from one point of view to another to try to understand the whys and hows of the drama and explore its consequences.

While we saw in him the spiritual child of Yasujiro Ozu (for the staging of the family and the passing of time), the director is approaching another Japanese master. And he’s well aware of the mountain he’s fighting by telling tales of monsters like: “This is the essential clue. A masterpiece”– he told us a few hours before the official meeting.

“From the moment we have a film like this, we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. But the idea was primarily to go further: to see the film, absorb it and see what we can do to update this exercise. Knowing that the three-chapter structure would definitely compare to what was done in Rashomon, we had to see how we could breathe new life into it.

From the moment we have such a movie, we can’t bear to think that it doesn’t exist

“The difference between Rashomon and Monster is that we didn’t necessarily want to shoot and say the same thing. In our case, it was important that during the chapters the audience was involved, on the one hand, and as the story progresses, they discover – as well as the characters – what the monster or Beyond the monster.”

“In the beginning, everyone has prejudices, beliefs. But we realize that these can be false leads. This search is as much about the characters as it is about the audience. You can almost say that the film is in four parts: there will be a fourth. It will be up to the audience, how to appropriate it all and what to recover can from him. This structure was really designed to engage and actively participate in the story.”

Unlike Rashomon, which shows the same events multiple times from different angles, each point of view at work in Monster tries to reveal the previous one off-screen. The plot is nuanced and thus rewritten at regular intervals until the third part blows away our certainty.

At this point, certain scenes feel different, and we may fear that over-explanation is favored in a scenario where the unspeakable plays an important role. It’s a little, of course, but very little, and this segment completes the mutation of the feature film, the family drama turned into a thriller, before revealing a heartbeat reminiscent of Lucas Dont’s Close, the 2022 edition of the Grand Prix.

Does a similar fate await Hirokazu Kore-eda, who we expect to take a vacation, at least with the screenplay prize (written by Yuji Sakamoto, not the filmmaker)? If the director doesn’t win his second Palme d’Or with a new story where childhood takes center stage and where emotion takes over, then the notes of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s wonderful soundtrack, who died last March, will ring out.

Interview by Maximilien Pierret in Cannes, May 17, 2023