For Daihachi Yoshida (The Kirishima Thing (2012), Teki Cometh (2024)), the encounter with Yukiko Motoya‘s Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! in the literary magazine Gunzo functioned as his call to become a film-director: “I read it all in one go, and rather than thinking, ‘That was interesting,’ or forming some particular impression, I felt as though a film had already taken shape in my head. It may sound a little exaggerated, but I thought, ‘I know how to turn this into a film’” (映画.com, 2014)).
After getting the permission of Yukiko Motoya’s theatre company – the novel was first a stage-play – and secured funding from his employer, the advertising-production company TYO, Yoshida set out to make his first feature film – a film exploring, in an aggerated way, the Lacanian idea that the ego is the product of misunderstanding; about refusing external objects, others, to base one’s ego on some form of reality and the performative logic of the ego – the ego as an imaginary performance for the Other.
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Yoshida’s narrative commences with by a tragic event: Kazuko (-) and Shoutaro (Koichi Ueda) meet, in their attempt to save a black cat from on oncoming truck, their untimely demise – driven to pieces with Kiyomi (Aimi Satsukawa), their youngest daughter, as sole witness.
After the funeral, Machiko (Hiromi Nagasaku), the wife of Shinji (Masatoshi Nagase), the eldest in the family, tries to console Kiyomi, who is separating herself from the others – “I think family … is for supporting each other at hard times”. Yet, when she, to reassure her, tells her that her sister Sumika (Eriko Sato), who is chasing her acting-dream in Tokyo, will return today, the news causes a panic-attack.
The morning after her arrival, Sumika immediately confronts her half-brother at the breakfast table about his decision to stop her monthly allowance. Upon hearing that her parents’ death halved the family’s income, she promptly tells him that she’ll take her portion of her inheritance – she needs money to support her glamourous life-style in function of her acting-dream. Yet, according to Shinji, all of the inheritance went to repay the father’s debt. To make matter worse, upon calling her agency, she learns that they will not extend her contract, due to her misplaced star-attitude and limited acting-skills.
To make head-way in Funuke: Show Some Love, You Losers!, we must not only approach Yoshida’s narrative as a take on the visitor narrative/intruder film – Sumika’s entry causes relational and subjective shifts, but also a narrative that problematizes the notion of reality from an experiential perspective in a highly effective way.
While the family consists of four people, the various relational dynamics turn around two central figures, Shinji and Sumika. Shinji realizes himself, within the familial space, as the patriarch. His signifier forms the law, the law that Machiko must radically support, and his violence, verbal as well as physical, functions as a brutal reminder of her failure to fulfill his ideal. His violence, in fact, echoes that the ideal wife’s function is the completing of the position of fatherly authority and erase those moments that exposes him as a structural fraud. Yet, beyond the logic of the ideal, the spectator will not fail not notice that his violence pushes Machiko away and keeps her at bay – away from his body, his subjectivity.
Sumika, on the other hand, manifests herself within the societal field as someone who is fixated on her body-image and an unrealized ego performed as nearly realized – Fake it until you make it; a performance not yet corroborated by the Other. This is not merely highlighted by the stylish way she presents herself to the familial Other, but also by her refusal to question herself and her less-than-stellar career as an actress. The latter is exemplified by Sumika’s verbal confrontation with Kiyomi in which she deems her own failure the fault of her younger sister and the weird manga that, by depicting her as a murderous succubus. Sumika’s explanation of becoming overly self-conscious by the award-winning one-shot manga only makes sense if go beyond the dimension of the gaze – the family falling victim by the oppressive gaze of the local community – and consider that these pages of fiction exposed Sumika’s truth, offered her and others (family, community, …etc,.) a confrontational glance at her hysterical desire – Love me! Show Me Love, You Losers! (Narra-note 1).
The image of the stylish actress she drapes herself with is, thus, not simply a phallic performance, a kind of parading to attract male attention and financial investment, but also a repressing defence against the truth concerning her talent and her unperceived fixation on love. The first flashback within the narrative corroborates the latter by showing how Sumika seeks to erase her father’s statement that she has no acting talent and the sexual solution she formulated to overcome his refusal to sponsor her. The truth of her desire – Love me! Show Me Love, You Losers! – is also evident in the letters she writes to director Tetsuo Komori, a director. There is not only a moment that signals that she runs a risk of turning into a ‘stalker’, but she also seeks to establish him as someone who loves her, who cannot function without her (Narra-note 2).
Sumika’s continued vindictive bullying of Kiyomi underlines that she utilizes her sister as a self-fabricated lightning rod to avoid questioning herself, to avoid having to give the signifiers of her lacking talent any serious thought. And the way Sumika interacts with Shinji does not only evoke that she holds a certain power over him, but that he is willing to appease her financial demands at all costs. All her comportment – manipulative and vindictive – proves that the only thing that can appease her is a male subject that, with an air of adoration and enumeration, puts her on a pedestal of uniqueness, a man that turns her into his muse and turns himself in a continuous producer of ‘genuine’ signs of love – the path of structural failure.
Yoshida confronts – and confront is the right signifier – the spectator with the black comical nature of his film right from the outside, by the way he frames the deadly accident, the catalyst of the narrative. By contrasting the peaceful atmosphere of rural Ishikawa, the relaxing black cat – as fuku-neko or a presence that causes bad luck? – and the bloody tire tracks, Yoshida turns the deadly intrusion of the truck into an ironic painting that neatly blends with the peacefulness of the natural environment.
It is evident that Yoshida, with his composition, seeks to intensify the tension between soto (outside/facade) and uchi (inside/reality) (Psycho-note 1). The shots bringing the ‘calm’ and peaceful’ beauty of rural Japan to the fore – the imagery of the peaceful facade – are contrasted with the shots that explore relational tensions, tensions reanimated by Kiyomi’s return – e.g. between Shinji and his wife Sumika, between Kiyomi and her younger sister Sumika.
This tension is also evident, for instance, in the contrast between Kazuko and Shinji’s demure funeral performance – presenting the mourning portraits to the ‘rural’ onlookers, and the gossip that guides the dynamic flow of the camera. This moment underlines not merely the fictitious nature of the facade, but the fact that, despite installing such a facade, ‘reality’ always leaks out. There are many similar moments throughout the narrative – Machiko’s excessive rolling over the floor after being hit, Sumika’s ‘glamorous’ entry, the electric fan that does not work, and so on, that emphasize and corroborate that the facade of harmony is but frail thing of deception.
The spectator will notice that Yoshida often utilizes tatami-shots to frame scenes that focus on familial interactions. While this compositional choice obviously seeks to recall Yasujiro Ozu and his gentle familial drama, it is evident from the comical surges that Yoshida seeks to peel off the fictional layers of warm emphatic humanism to expose the darker subjective currents (e.g. trauma, unresolved anger, …) that animate the clashes between ego and brutally prove that intersubjectivity is but a mirage, an illusion.
Given our previous remarks, it would not be wrong to state that the search to puncture the mundane, to subvert the fictional sense of harmony, animates the comical logic of the narrative (e.g. the conversational comedy, the visual comical puns, … etc.) and orients the structuring of speech-interactions – i.e. unexpected vocalisations always turn up to threaten to derail or thwart the fiction of harmony established by the mere choice of engaging in conversation. Yoshida, however, does not merely seek to expose the fictionality of this peaceful mundanity, but to show, with exaggerations and subtle absurdities, that everyone is, in some way or another, complicit in maintaining such ceremonious fiction, such formal lie.
Yoshida re-emphasizes the latter by showing, via Sumika, that certain subjects do not take the social semblant – or being its support, being its performer – that seriously – they perform their personal fiction instead. If Sumika functions as a disruptive foreign element, it is not simply because she inserts herself as urban element in the rural and refuses to play along with the familial expectations, but also because she exposes the performative fictionality of the social image of harmony.
Funuke: Show Some Love, You Losers! delivers a darkish comical experience that quite seriously exposes the fictitious dimension of our ego – of the image we present to others. Yoshida playfully confronts the spectator with an enticing riddle: is the black cat a sign that things will turn around for Sumika and Kiyomi or a sign of the family’s imminent decay? The answer to this question will surprise you. So, do yourself a favour, and give this little gem of familial drama a watch. Recommended.
Notes
Narra-note 1: At the same time, the spectator is confronted with the function of Kiyomi’s manga writing. Is it a mere way to approach femininity, female desire, and sexuality or did she take her sister as a model merely to explore the seductive crossroads between sexuality, desire, and violence?
Narra-note 2: The second flashback, Shinji’s flashback, does not merely stage a transgressive family secret, but puts Sumika’s desire for love in all its hysterical thirst on display.
Narra-note 3: Sumika, who is not devoid of darkish echoes to Miike’s Asami, eventually establishes herself a someone who, to ensure her sense of being loved, force men into, what can be called, a ‘monogamous’ contract of silent adoration and (financial) support. She needs men to put herself on the pedestal of her fantasy, she needs men to feel as if she is the phallus.
Psycho-note 1: We would, cautiously, coin the term facadality to highlight that facade and reality are intrinsically linked. There is a socially reflected facadality, the facade the subject presents the o/Other is his reality. Yet, there is also a silent facadality, the ego is both reality and facade, a facade that hides subjectivity.
References:
映画.com. (2014, October 16). 吉田大八監督、出世作「桐島、部活やめるってよ」製作は「後ろ向きだった」? 映画.Com. https://eiga.com/news/20141016/15/