Nezura 1964 (2020)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

53 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is quite a short movie - it's not even as long as the 53 minutes it claims to be. There's maybe ten minutes at the end that is made up of credits and other stuff. I would, however, highly recommend sticking around for that ten minutes, because the "other stuff" consists of behind-the-scenes shots that show the cast and crew having a great time, and also Mach Fumiake looking really beautiful and singing the film's theme tune, as well as another song by the immediately recognizable Akira Kushida over the end credits, which was a surprise. So basically this is a film that just keeps on giving right up until the very end.

I'd been waiting to see this for a long time, and it was as exciting to finally watch it as I'd hoped, with the added bonus that I had somehow been geared up for a cynical comedy and ended up watching something far more heartfelt. The film itself gives you some context in the opening, but to recap: During the monster-movie boom in the mid-20th century, Daiei Studios, not yet having come out with their biggest hit, Gamera, was planning to make a movie called Giant Horde Beast Nezura. ("Nezura" is a kaiju-ified version of the word "nezumi", which means rat.) The film's monster concept was to use literal live rats that were brought in off the street and were going to be filmed (hopefully) rampaging through detailed miniature city sets, and then eventually there would be a giant rat creature and other actors and all that usual business too. As one might expect, this didn't go so well, with the rats being city rats and infested with fleas and sickness; eventually production ceased and the rats were incinerated per an order by the city health department.

Nezura 1964 is a faux documentary that focuses on the crew behind this planned film, specifically how everyone put a ton of hope and effort into a project that eventually crashed and (literally) burned. It is comedic, but ultimately the sensational headline we all know about that one weird monster movie where they were gonna use live rats falls by the wayside in favor of an exploration of just plain human nature - the nature of humans to do what we love, and to feel bereft and devastated when that's taken away from us by circumstance. And if you pay attention you'll see that "haha why did they use real rats that was stupid" isn't the point, the point is also that this was all happening at a time when focus was shifting rapidly and drastically away from feature films and onto television - a change that led to the birth of the Ultra series, but meant a lot of concepts for kaiju films never got out of development.

If the faux-documentary angle sounds familiar to you, maybe you've also seen The Great Buddha: Arrival. The concept of that film is in many ways the same as Nezura 1964, but The Great Buddha: Arrival is a meta-love letter to a lost film and a treatise on the importance of memory as a practice of keeping things alive, and Nezura 1964 is... well, I just watched it, so I need some time to digest it, but like I said, it's a movie about people who are invested in making movies putting their sweat and tears into an endeavor that fails. The lead "actor" from The Great Buddha: Arrival is also the lead actor in this film, and the rest of the cast is made up of a bunch of other people you'll recognize from various other toku series, specifically a lot of Gamera folks.

So, is the movie itself good? Very. It's pretty bare-bones, there's not a lot to it, but what makes it good is not even necessarily how it feels to watch it - even though it is fun and I liked it - but the fact that there's a director who is making these movies with a cast and crew who are as passionate as he is about preserving the idea of lost or unmade films that are as special and important to the history of this particular area of cinema as are the films that did get made. (He also did Hedorah: Silent Spring, which is great fun.) I think this one looks a little bit more polished than The Great Buddha: Arrival, but it's not supposed to be, since it's framed as a documentary shot in the early 1960s. There's not as much of a meta element here, which is fine, Great Buddha called for that and this one didn't, but it's still fascinating as an exploration of fiction and that liminal space inhabited by things that got so close to existing that the idea of them is still out there in the world even if they aren't. And the rats are so cute! A big part of why Nezura failed was because the crew couldn't rile the rats up enough to look menacing. And they really, really aren't, they just look adorable. I presume the crew of this film sourced them more ethically than they did in the '60s.