Hazard – No Horror Here

t!   | Movies, Review | June 9, 2007 at 2:23 am         Print

I am at the Hole in the Head Film Festival, the horror offshoot of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. I am here because a movie I worked on is premiering here tomorrow night (tonight), but I made my friends drive up a day earlier than expected so I can see some movies, and one film in particular – Hazard. The newest film by Sion Sono, the genius behind Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club), one of the most fascinating, if gory J-horror films I have ever loved. But, after seeing the Hazard trailer, I was left wondering why it is playing at this festival. It didn’t look like a horror film. There were no suicides, no children joining cults, none of the trademarks of what I expect of Sonu’s films. I think that the festival organizers invited the film to play because of Sono’s previous work, without realizing that he has made an amazing drama, not the expected J-horror film…

Hazard is pure poetry. A rare film that flows like the works of an angry young poet, and if Sono is the poet, than Jai West as “Lee” is his muse. Lee is an angry young man influenced by the poetry of chaos and the words of Walt Whitman, in love with life and the city of New York and with every experience he can attain – fearless and beautiful, just like the film. But, the story is Shin’s (Joe Odagiri). A college student who is paralyzed by the unadventurous life he leads in Japan, he chances upon a travel book about the dangers of New York City, makes immediate plans to go there, and when he lands he is immediately humiliated by an American girl, abused by a taxi driver, and then mugged (to the applause of native New Yorkers) by two men who are trying to “help” him. Chance leads him to Lee, who takes him in and introduce him to the freedom that they he has found living in New York.

The poetry in the movie is in the narrative, and the non-linear approach to telling the story of Shin and his relationship with Lee. The story is narrated by a small boy, telling the story of Shin in both New York and Japan in both the past and present tense – which I thought was a subtitle issue until the boy’s identity and place in the story is revealed, creating layers of complexity on what would otherwise be an average coming of age story of three adventurous youth. The story moves between time and country and mood, and Sono is a strong enough director to make this work, and even when it gets confusing he pulls the narrative threads back together to create a new connection between the characters, making them all the more beautiful in the process.

And, the actors themselves are the expression of Sono’s poetry. Jai West is a face to remember. There are few actors in the world with his screen presence, his physical and vocal ability, the ability to recite poetry and leave you feeling as if you are at the most dynamic poetry slam in the world. Odagiri is supposed to be the star, but until the very last scene of the movie he seems out of place, just a perfectly capable actor. Until you realize that only someone with a great amount of talent could quietly change from an emotionally dead college student to scared foreigner to adventurous angel to his man-in-full (and Lee’s equal) without a viewer realizing the power of his changing person until the very last scene. Motoki Fukami is wonderful as the crazy-in-love ganster with a heart of sweetness and a penchant for using his gun to stir up shit, just for the fun of it.

I wish I could tell more about the plot of the film, but the plot is so tightly constructed that to divulge any part of the plot line would be to spoil the entire film. I had a conversation with someone last night about the importance of “story”, and this is one of those gems that show that with an amazing story, much else in a film can be forgiven.

The movie is far from perfect. All New York scenes are shot using a hand-held camera, making many of the action scenes difficult to follow. Many of the shots are grainy and dark, adding to the difficulty of viewing some scenes, and adding an air of filmmaking pretentiousness to the film. Some scenes are too long as Sonu falls victim to the writer/director trap of falling in love with some of his own images and ideas and not realizing that some of them would have been best left on the editing floor. And, the narrative approach reminded me much to much of a small Japanese/American film, Niji no shita ni (Under the Rainbow), down to the role of the child in the film and his narrative voice and the mystery of the film itself.

I want to complain about the clichés in the film, but, I can’t. Because Sonu is a visionary enough director that even when he traffics in the trite, he turns the old into something new. A scene where it starts to rain, and Lee magically has four candy-coloured raincoats handy, and he and three friends dance in the rain on their way to the “Love Room”, a couch atop a pile of trash overlooking Manhattan. Choreographed scenes, such as one where the boys all sit at the Love Room with broken umbrellas, tossing them to the wind at the same time. The old “salvation through poetry” routine in film is already overused, yet Sonu turns this convention in its head, allowing Lee’s love of poetry (specifically the Walt Whitman poem The Dark Side) to direct him and his team to action. The Dark Side shows Whitman’s emotional paralyzation at not being able to do anything for the sake of those humans that need it the most, yet Sonu, through Lee, uses the injustices described in the poem as a call to action, a plan to force the powers-that-be to live on Lee’s terms, not the other way around.

No one wanted to see this film with me tonight, they all went to bed early. I am glad I got to see it alone. Because, whenever I see a really good film I tend to go speechless. Just like the last part of The Dark Side, “…I…See, hear, and am silent.” Not only am I now silent, but I don’t remember the last time a scene from a film caused me to break out in a sob with my mouth wide open at the beauty that I had just seen. This film has many, many flaws, but there is so much beauty and poetry and life and love and my youth reflected in this film that I am sitting in a hotel lobby at 3:30 in the morning to tell you about this experience, because this is a movie that needs to be shared.