Japanese master filmmaker Hirokazu Kore Ida’s film ‘Monster’ takes us into the soft world of children. Carrying forward the idea of his previous films ‘Shapelifter’ and ‘Broker’, this time through the eyes of a child, he explores modern morals and manners, schooling, social media rumors, and family inaction among the heartless human.
Best Feature Film
His previous film ‘Shapelifter’ (2018) won the ‘Palme d Or’ for Best Feature Film at the 71st Cannes Film Festival. The film begins with shots of a Hostess Bar building catching fire late at night and fire brigade vehicles blaring through the streets. The camera pans over the city to a small apartment balcony where Saori, a lonely woman, is telling her son Minato that Mr. Hori, his schoolteacher, was a regular customer of the bar.
Stories and Truths Unfold
The next morning, Saori’s son returns from school to report that his teacher, Mr. Hori, pushed him and insulted him by calling him a ‘pig’s brain’. Saori’s husband is dead and she is raising Minato alone. On her complaint, the school administration sets up an investigation, and from here the script gets increasingly complicated. Many stories and truths uphold. On the edge of the city where the forest and the sea begin, Minato creates a magical world with his girl classmate in a wrecked railway coach. Their conversations about the world of elders raise a barrage of questions and the film does not answer them.
Modern and Wealthy Japan
Hirokazu Kore Ida delves into the children’s routines at home, school, neighborhood, and town with frequent flashbacks and detailed moralizing. For the first time in world cinema, such pictures of the changing world of children in modern and wealthy Japan are revealed in an intimate way. The collage of each scene and the stories behind them takes the film to new artistic heights, making the film fresh, suspenseful, and hopeful.
Thirty-minute Film Leaves A Magical Effect
This year, the major attraction of the Cannes Film Festival was the short film ‘Strange Way of Life’ by famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and his master class. The thirty-minute film leaves a magical effect due to the tremendous acting skills of Pedro Pascal and Hollywood star Ethan Hawke.
In the American Western style, two old gay friends reunite after twenty-five years in the remote geography of Mexico, horse riding, pistols, gunfire, everything in the ‘Western’ style. The scenes of friendship and suspicion between the two men are intense.
Bullets Fire
Ethan Hawke suspects that Pedro Pascal’s son murdered his sister-in-law. The next morning, when he arrives to kill the would-be assassin, he finds Pedro Pascal already there. Bullets fire. Ethan is injured and Pedro is treating him. It is the script of an entire film. Don’t know why Pedro Almodóvar made it a short film.
