directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Japan
95 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I watched this without subtitles when it was uploaded to the internet for the first time in September, and said to myself that if anybody ever fansubbed it, I would watch it again and give it the proper review it deserves, but I didn't seriously expect that to happen... until it did. I can't even express how happy I am that this film, which I had been searching for for ages, is finally available online and easy to find. It gives me hope that other obscure films I'm after will eventually see the light of day too. After a second viewing with more context, I'm bumping my rating up from four to five stars because I truly can't find anything wrong with this film at all.
I think Nobuhiko Obayashi is probably at his best when he's making movies about cinema. A good portion of his work involves elements of metafiction, and when he uses that to talk about cinema and the role of film in our lives and our memories, his usual style becomes a reflection on the nature of fiction and memory itself that is really inimitable. This is a movie all about how cinema works to freeze a moment in time so that we can go back to it over and over, living in it forever if we want to - to our detriment, ultimately, if we lose ourselves in it. But it's also about how seductive it is to lose ourselves in it.
The story of the film is about a scenario writer, Ryohei, who is determined to create something really great and attaches himself to a studio that was once magnificent but now is just plugging along, riding the wave of its earlier success for as long as it can - which doesn't seem to be able to last. It is also about a once-famous, now reclusive actress who has gone into seclusion on a private island she owns, along with the director who made her career. Once the studio gets wind that she's still living there and learns that somehow she remains unnaturally young, stuck the way she looked at the height of her career and subsequent disappearance from the public eye, they see a scoop, a way to take advantage of her one last time. They send the writer to the island - which he doesn't do against his will, it should be noted; he falls as quickly in love with the actress as the studio execs do with the idea of the paycheck she could bring in - where initially he's regarded as just one of many tourists who come seeking a glimpse of the forever starlet, but eventually is taken in by her personally after they meet in a dreamlike chance encounter at a restaurant and she gives him a necklace.
The film itself echoes the themes that its story presents. A lot of the actors in it are actually people who were active in Japan's film industry during its golden age, and at the time of its release had been acting (many of them together) for thirty years or more. There's people in this who you will definitely recognize if you've seen pretty much any Toho film ever, and casting them changes this from just a movie about filmmaking to something that has an element of truth. (I really love when Makoto Satô shows up inexplicably dressed like a cowboy.) Possibly the most important casting choice was Wakaba Irie playing the starlet and Takako Irie, her real-life mother, playing the older version of herself. The elder Irie did a stint of bakeneko films early on in her career, and her/her daughter's role in this film is an actress who also made a name playing in bakeneko film. Wakaba Irie is quite striking and looks remarkably like her mother, so having the two of them switch roles depending on the scene creates an effect that is almost uncanny.
So like I said, the main theme of this is the deep sense of nostalgia that cinema fosters in us. The actress Ryuzoji exits her role in society to forever play a role alone on her island, to forever be who she was at that one moment, her best film. She's obsessed with a man from her past, her co-star, who left to become a Hollywood actor and whose leaving she could never fully accept - this is why she takes in Ryohei, the writer; his resemblance to her former lover (they are both played by the same actor) means she can't let him go either, and draws him into the pocket of frozen time she's created on the island. The film studio itself is also a place where time acts strangely; clocks stop, everyone who lives around it seems arrested in a perpetual single moment. Almost everybody who works there except for Ryohei is dressed anachronistically or just strangely, which makes it feel like Ryohei himself is in a movie where everyone around him is playing their specific part. Legend of the Cat Monster is full of in-between spaces created by the influence of filmmaking on the world around it, places where everything stays the same and you can revisit it as many times as you like. But of course, while a film may never age, the viewer inevitably will. The idyllic, pastoral feeling of the first half of this film comes up harshly against the realization that a person cannot exist forever in the same moment of time that the second half brings, but it's never without melancholy, a feeling that even though being stuck in the past hurts us in the long run, doesn't the hurt feel good, a little bit?
Ryohei, before he becomes ensnared in the actress' aura, is also in love with his coworker Yoko, who eventually follows him to the island to try to break through whatever's drawn him there. She is rebuked, physically, from the actress and director's home, chased off the island, because she represents the re-starting of time: A younger woman, a woman living in the modern world, moving forward, can't be tolerated. She reminds everyone too much that they're aging and will eventually be replaced by a new generation. This is also brought up, but not cast in such a negative light, by a small boy hanging around with a tiny camera, playing director - he says he's the director, and he is the director. He's the generation that will grow up to become new directors, new filmmakers, doing everything over again but with a fresh eye. The breaking of the spell by Yoko has disastrous consequences for nearly everyone involved who is unable to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having her there. When we finally see what Ryohei spent all this time writing, the screenplay that's supposed to make him, and all it is is pages and pages of him writing his own name over and over, desperately trying to remember who he is while Ryuzoji desperately tries to make him into the man she wishes he was... there's something so potent about that.
I'm having a much harder time talking about this film than I thought I would because I'm trying to assume no real familiarity with Obayashi and his particular style. I can tell you that I love this movie and it means a lot to me and it's one of my favorites of his and it makes me sad in a very specific way, but I can't really tell you why, because everyone experiences a film differently. All I can do is recommend it to everyone, and maybe you'll get what I got out of it, maybe not. But I think that everyone can understand that feeling of (sometimes painful) nostalgia that comes with watching an old film and recognizing an era that is gone forever for you now. It doesn't even have to be a fictional film, it can be a home movie. This is more about how the act of capturing something on camera places it in a different register in our minds, one where it exists forever in that one moment. The addition of a fictional storyline to that creates an end product that is forever slightly better than reality - something we can never quite go back to, no matter how much we try.
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