Critic of ‘Monster’, Koreeda brings social scourges to Cannes

Hirokazu Koreeda has built his filmography around a humanist and unprejudiced approach to the numerous social scourges that plague the Japanese nation, from child abandonment (‘Nobody knows’) to urban alienation (‘Air Doll’), going through the ineffectiveness of the adoption system (‘Like father, like son’). For his look at the universe of petty crime and family dysfunction in ‘A family affair’, the Japanese filmmaker won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, an award to which he aspires again this year with ‘Monster’, a work that, due to the breadth of its thematic radius of action, seems to be one of the most ambitious of its director.

The narrative structure that Koreeda opts for when it comes to covering a multitude of social problems is that of a game of perspectives, in the manner of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’ referential. Thus, what initially appears as the odyssey of a widowed mother who must deal with the school problems of her pre-adolescent son, expands to include half a dozen characters who complete a melodramatic narrative puzzle. The themes do not stop emerging in an expansive story that hits its characters mercilessly. There is the machismo of a culture that educates its children to be “real men”, also the fear of the institutions to see their reputation put in doubt, or the loss of confidence of the parents towards the educational community, going through the alcoholism, child abuse, bullyingthe dissemination of hoaxes on social networks… There is still more, but it is worth not uncovering the secrets of a plot that seeks to surprise the viewer with each change of point of view (a strategy that Koreeda had already tried in the most stimulating and enigmatic ‘The Third Murder’).

The biggest problem with ‘Monster’ is that, In his desire to prove the suffering of his characters, he ends up catching the viewer in a crossfire of sinister shocks.. It is surprising that a director with the tact and delicacy of Koreeda abuses, for example, the game with the possibility that one of his characters may have committed suicide. In his defense, it should be said that ‘Monster’ is the first Japanese fiction feature film that does not have a script by the filmmaker himself, a task that Yûji Sakamoto assumes on this occasion. Then, in the formal field, the film moves from the stimulating estrangement of its initial section towards a naturalism of more recognizable coordinates.

In any case, ‘Monster’ settles harmoniously in the universe of Koreeda, who has always been interested in empathetically portraying forgotten or vilified figures by society. In this case, and by turns, different characters label as “monsters” some grieving children, a confused mother, a timid teacher, an overly hermetic school principal or an entire community doomed to paranoia and lack of communication ( a veritable salad of hardships that turns ‘Monster’ into a distant cousin of works like ‘Crash’ by Paul Haggis or the choral melodramas by the duo formed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga). Too much misery for Koreeda to fulfill his noble desire to humanize a group of characters who have to atone for the sins of a society plunged into a moral pit that seems to have no bottom.

For fans of choral dramas with a high emotional intensity

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DATA SHEET

Address: Hirokazu Koreeda Distribution: Soya Kurokawa, Hiiragi Hinata, Sakura Ando, ​​Eita, Mitsuki Takahata Country: Japan Year: 2023 Release date: – Gender: Drama Script: Yuji Sakamoto Duration: 126 min.

Synopsis: When her young son Minato starts behaving strangely, his mother senses something is wrong. Finding out that a teacher is responsible for all this, she bursts into the school demanding to know what is going on. But as the story unfolds through the eyes of the mother, the teacher and the boy, the truth slowly comes to light…