Introduction

Masashi Yamamoto (Wonderful Paradise (2020)) first made a splash nationally as well as internationally with his Robinson’s Garden. He did not only win the Zitty Award at 1987 edition of the Berlinale, but he also earned the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award. Yet, as time passes by, certain films once revered begin to wear and tear. Did Robinson’s Garden maintained its fresh shine, or has it become rusty?

Review

One drunken night, while wandering through the streets of Tokyo’s suburbs, drug-dealing slacker Kumi (Kumiko Ohta) discovers a run-down warehouse in an abandoned industrial site overgrown with lush greenery. She promptly decides to quit the drug-dealing business, move out her current living-place, and settle at her newfound oasis. Armed with supplies to cultivate the land and paint the walls, she starts turning this lush oasis into a peaceful paradise for herself and a cadre of hippies, artists, punkers, and foreigners who want to (temporarily) escape from the suffocating nature of Tokyo’s hectic bubble era society.

The thematical intentions of Yamamoto in Robinson’s Garden are evident. By concatenating mundane atmospheres – the atmosphere of a bar, a busy Indian restaurant, the bustling streets of the never-sleeping downtown area of Tokyo, the quieter roads of Tokyo’s suburbs, the lush oasis of greenery, …etc., he aims to show how the bubble society, by becoming more and more intoxicated with consumption – be it of alcohol, drugs, gadgets, hamburgers, or fatty chicken, destroys social bonds and the dynamic of social interactions. The more waste a consuming subject produces, the more he empties his bonds with others.

The first element Yamamoto visualizes is the violent dimension of miscommunication that creates social fissures, e.g. people misunderstanding each other because they do not know each other’s language, as well as the dimension of social disconnection, e.g. people unable or unwilling to seriously listen to the other, people that talk to each other but not with each other, subjects that are isolated by others and, as a result, boil with frustration, … etc.

It is, in fact, precisely because modern society of consumption eats at the fabric of human relationships that physical violence quickly breaks out at Kumi’s lush and colourful garden. While the garden should have enabled people to escape the oppressive demands of society, these people are unable to shake of the negative impact of society on their subject, because it has poisoned their inter-subjective functioning – each one of them is, in a certain way, a loner, Kumi included.

 

The strange girl that wanders around the garden and who is constantly rude to Kumi is deeply marked by such society drunk on consumption. She does not only drink the latest soft drink or happily eat a box of KFC-chicken, but she also has a collection of colourful toys somewhere hidden in the building and a wide variety of stickers of pop-culture (e.g. dragon ball, …etc.) to adorn the place she has colonized.

Kumi’s plan to create an oasis of peace does, in other words, not go as planned and she slowly slips into madness. What causes this madness? The most obvious answer is that Kumi, by escaping in the lush greenery of her paradise, cuts herself off from all human connections – from relationships that were already deeply problematic. Some other spectators might argue that her descend into madness is caused by poisoning, because the blossoming of consumption goes hand in hand with thoughtlessly poisoning the very earth that allows us to fuel and sustain our body. Yet whatever causes her madness – be it via the direct impact of society on social bonds or the indirect impact of such society on nature, Kumi’s difficulty to bend nature to her wishes is ultimately nothing other than a celebration of the resilience of mother earth against the ravaging impact of a consuming mankind.

Yamamoto’s dynamic composition aims to evoke moods and atmospheres. Dynamism is used in two different but complementary ways. First, Yamamoto uses a blend of spatial and tracking movement to cinematographically circle around Kumi as she wanders through the various narrative spaces. By following her coming and going, Yamamoto tries to make the spectator feel the mood of the space through her subjective presence (i.e. the sounds, the colours, its textures, … etc.).

Second, by letting the dynamic composition, at times, temporarily wander off Kumi or any other characters he focuses on, Yamamoto emphasizes the visual richness of the environments. It’s this kind of impressionistic wandering-off that gives the spectator time to try and soak in the different moods and atmospheres.

Another technique Yamamoto utilizes to let his composition evokes atmosphere is by allowing the dimension of sound dictate the cinematographical wandering-off. Rather than composing his imagery in a way that simply supports the unfolding of his narrative, Yamamoto often prefers to combine dynamic imagery to literally and figuratively ‘chase’ a variety of sounds (e.g. the sound of cicadas, the ringing of a bicycle bell, a muffled discussion in a nearby house, the thunderous sound of the underground, the wind blowing, the rattling of the rain … etc.) to give an impression of the mood or atmosphere of a certain narrative space. The image is, as a matter of fact, utilized in a similar impressionistic manner (Narra-note 1). By inserting poetic evocative shots, (e.g. of a tree or a plant swaying in the wind, Kumi letting her face touch the surface of the water, a frog jumping on the ground, ants crawling in a hole, … etc.), Yamamoto does not attempt to enhance the atmosphere and mood of the narrative, but also tries to evokes, by emphasizing what visually attracts Kumi, her vain desire to find a subjective kind of peace.

Yet, despite all the techniques that Yamamoto utilizes to make the atmosphere and mood sensible for the spectator, Robinson’s Garden does not really succeed in engaging the contemporary spectator. The reason for this failure is twofold: rhythmical problems and the lack of a visual refinedness. The former is due to Yamamoto’s overdependence on his ‘impressionistic wandering-off’ while the latter is function of his cinematographical straightforwardness. If Yamamoto could have controlled the rhythm of his narrative better and dared to add more visual flair in his composition, Robinson’s Garden would have been, even now, a must-see.

Even though Robinson’s Garden boasts an important message about the destructive nature of the capitalistic logic on social bonds and subjectivity and the way we, as humans, treat our planet, Yamamoto is not able to create a composition that engages the spectator with its highly relevant message. The director has great compositional ideas, but his lack of rhythmical sense and compositional flair renders his narrative unable to truly make the atmospheres and moods sensible for the contemporary spectator.   

Notes

Narra-note 1: In some rare instances, Yamamoto also enters some poetry of the word, like when Kumi’s lover starts a manzai-like discourse against a buzzing mosquito. Yet, these moments do not only have a poetic flair but are also slightly disconcerting.