Monday, January 28, 2008
This World of Ours (俺たちの世界)
Japanese director Ryo Nakajima's (中島良) feature debut "This World of Ours (俺たちの世界)" (Japan 2007, 94 min.) is a dark, raw, uncompromising, sometime hard to watch drama about a group of young outcastes struggling to make sense of their existences in the society, and the world.
Ami is a teenager girl who is about to jump off the roof when she does not cut her wrist repeatedly. But she is also able to witness the miseries of other misfits. Roy is a high school bully who shuts himself off from the world and builds a bomb to "break out his shell." Hiroki is graduating from college and looking for a salary job, but he gets involved in a gang rape which ruins his future that he has been dreaming about. All of them feel that there is no where to go in this society. They create a world of their own. With impressive performance and direction, the film is filled with heartfelt emotions from these desperate teenagers. The sound track is very effective to express film's dark subject matters. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata becomes chilling, painful, disturbing, and sad in the film, as if we can hear those weeping souls. Although I am not a big fan of his shaking camera, but the very young Ryo Nakajima (born in 1983) clearly shows his talent and complexity in this film that he started to write when he was 19 years old. I wonder what a film might be like if he makes a comedy. This film will be screened (Feb 10 & 11) at the upcoming the 10th San Francisco Independent Film Festival.
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Labels: SFIndie08
