A Ghost of a Chance (2011)

directed by Koki Mitani

Japan

142 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as part of a project I'm doing where I use a list randomizer to generate a random movie from my worryingly long watchlist and then I watch it, no matter what it is. A Ghost of a Chance had been sitting on there for a while despite having a fun, quirky premise, most likely because it's just shy of two and a half hours long, and who has time for that. But I'm thankful to whatever algorithm is behind list randomization for picking this, because I really loved it. If nothing else, it is worth watching just for Hiroshi Abe tap-dancing.

Eri Fukatsu (lately of the smash hit Suzume, but she also has a lot of other credits, including the adaptation of Parasyte) plays a sort of not very good lawyer named Emi. She's just a little uncoordinated and seems new to the game, but hers is the kind of profession where you need to be taken seriously, and she decidedly is not. She takes on a case where her client is accused of murdering his wife, and his alibi is that at the time he was staying at a remote inn in the mountains, and could not possibly have been responsible for the murder as he was getting sat on by a ghost while it was occurring. Yeah, right. The prosecution jokes that the only way that alibi would fly is if Emi could get the ghost to come to court and give testimony.

So she does that.

I'm not sure what exactly she was looking for when she retraced her client's steps to the inn, because at this early point in the movie she was as dismissive of the existence of ghosts as anybody. The whole thing was a last-ditch endeavor to save a client who had little chance of a fair shot and, in the process, save Emi's downsliding career. Although the innkeeper is at first reticent, Emi ends up staying in the same room as her client, and as soon as she falls asleep she is confronted with the reality that her client was telling the truth: The inn is haunted by the ghost of a general from the Sengoku period, who sits on her and immobilizes her in exactly the same way he did to her client according to his alibi.

I have not personally seen the popular TV series Ghosts, but I'm going to use it as a way to try to get people to watch A Ghost of a Chance, because I feel like if you like that, you'd like this. The ghost and the mechanics behind his existence as a ghost are the funnest part of this movie. Rokubei seems like a chill guy. The samurai stuff was four-hundred-aught years ago. Nowadays he just wants to hang out and smell some cheeseburgers. He knows he's dead, and he knows that only certain people can see him, which is unfortunate for Emi's hope of getting him in front of a judge to give testimony, but will come into play later. He's fairly up-to-date on world events because the inn has a television, and furthermore he can actually leave his inn, but he has to, like, take a taxi or whatever, he doesn't exactly have superpowers. The real joy of this film comes from watching all the other actors play off of a character who is not supposed to be visible: This is a classic bit, and it absolutely is still entertaining to watch everybody thoroughly ignore an actor who you, as the viewer, know in real life is just somebody standing there. I appreciated that they didn't CGI Rokubei into being ethereal and have gags where people stick their hand through him or something like that. It's harder for the actors, but much more satisfying to watch.

I was going to say something about how sometimes a gimmick can carry an entire film, but after watching this for a while, it really doesn't feel like a gimmick, it's more of just... an idea. There's an introductory period where we're being shown, as I said, the mechanics of ghosthood in Rokubei's specific situation. This is where we get all the funny stuff like Emi looking crazy to outsiders for apparently conversing with nobody, and Rokubei occasionally scaring the living daylights out of random passersby who can see him (again, only a select few). After that, the movie proceeds apace. It continues on, plot having been established, and really gets into how exactly getting a testimony from somebody who doesn't have a physical body - and getting the living to believe that testimony - would work. They do some "ghost hunting 101" stuff to prove Rokubei's existence to the jury, like taking stereotypical blurry ghost photos of him and at one point coating him in magnetic sand so people can see his silhouette, and eventually settle on providing him with a harmonica that he can blow into for "yes" and "no" answers. The judge is surprisingly amenable to this, but in fairness they do go to fairly extreme lengths to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his court is, in fact, temporarily haunted. At one point Emi's boss even dies. ("This is not good", his ghost says.)

We the viewers know from the beginning that the client is not guilty, because we saw the people who really murdered his wife, and he wasn't one of them. But the film deftly keeps the specifics of it out of our sight until the final act. It isn't all just ghost stuff - Emi does still have a case to win. Various monkey wrenches keep getting thrown in the legal works, with maybe the most interesting of them being that the prosecution can fully see Rokubei, but is just pretending he can't, because it makes more sense to dismiss your opponent as obviously playing some kind of prank rather than validate her and risk losing the case, not to mention establishing a paradigm-shifting legal precedent. This is why the movie is two and a half hours long: It needs all that space to prove it's not just a one-trick pony.

Toshiyuki Nishida - who has also had the honor of being Kosuke Kindaichi at least once - plays Rokubei so perfectly I can't imagine anybody else in the role, but Fukatsu also plays Emi with an understated skill that I'd be remiss not to mention. Hers is an interesting character, because she's earnest but lacks self-confidence and real-world experience. I think it's a little difficult to act like somebody who is as genuine but also as un-self-aware as Emi is. And you really get a sense of her growth as a businesswoman from the start of the film to where she ends up - seeing her confidently slam-dunk the case at the end of the film is immensely satisfying. Her relationship with Rokubei changes subtly throughout the film as well: He starts off rather bluntly calling her "onna" (woman) and ends up calling her "hime" (princess), despite her protests.

I watch a lot of samurai stuff, so this whole idea tickled me. There's also something really funny about Toho, purveyors of arguably some of the best samurai films ever made, making fun of themselves a little in something like A Ghost of a Chance. Personally, I really enjoyed this. I thought it was well-rounded and never felt like it was using its unusual premise as a crutch. There's so much more to it than just what I've described in this review, and I'd love for others to check it out.