Noriko's Dinner Table

It may seem like Sion Sono’s quiet, meditative family drama Noriko’s Dinner Table is restrained; compared to Suicide Club’s flashy, messy, head-on approach in particular. But Noriko’s, billed as the “prequel” to Club, is actually utterly self-indulgent. Take a look at the 159-minute runtime, for instance, or the way in which Sono completely basks in his own pet concept—the suicide club website and cult—like a grad student writing his thesis on it. It seems he, probably due at least in part to the success of Club, had full creative reign with no one forcing him to cut or reshuffle anything. Naturally, this is both good and bad.

The only thing linking this film to its notorious J-horror predecessor is the mythos of the “club” itself—so let’s get it out of the way right now. The website (red dots for female suicide victims, white for males) and the schoolgirl train-splatter incident are both further explored, but none of the previous characters return (that I can recall, but it has been awhile since I saw Club). Luckily, that includes the deranged glam-rock dude from the bowling alley, who is nowhere to be seen.

Instead our protagonists are the titular Noriko, a withdrawn and repressed high school student who longs to attend college in Tokyo, and her father, mother, and sister Yuka. They lead a seemingly peaceful, carefree existence in a small seaside village that most of us would envy. However, her father’s disapproval of her big-city plans soon leads Noriko to seek refuge online—you can guess which website—with other girls her age. Before long, she packs up and runs away, planning to stay with the leader of the bunch, known by the online handle “Ueno Station 54” (played by the awfully charismatic Tsugumi).

From here, the narrative jumps between Noriko’s perspective, her sister Yuka’s, and then her father’s. Noriko and her sister become actors for a hire-a-family business (like prostitutes without the sex, lonely clients hire them to act out vital roles missing from their lives), and their father tries to track them down and prove he’s capable of understanding them—an ever-elusive goal for the parents of teenage daughters, I’m sure.

More often than not, the film hits all the right marks tonally. The inner monologues of the characters are pretentious at times, but usually touching and poignant. The mise-en-scene is fantastic, with each of the three perspectives strewn together seamlessly. This allows their stories to make up a fluid whole, instead of a fractured puzzle. It only loses steam a bit during the final act, which is the only portion of the film that could have benefitted from some tighter editing. There’s a lot of crying, confessions, and confrontation—yet the emotional payoff seems to be lacking. Still, it’s completely fitting that—like the baffling behaviour of some of its protagonists—Noriko’s Dinner Table offers no easy solutions.

The Sky Crawlers (スカイ・クロラ, 2008)

The particulars are these: It's based on the five-book Japanese novel series by Hiroshi Morii, the prolific science mystery author of several similarly described series'. This appears to be the singular work to appear on film. As far as Sky Crawlers goes, it turned out to be quite an accomplishment coaxing a single film from the immense and complex literary work, much the same way Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika novel put Satoshi Kon & Co. to the test, requiring a leap of faith on the author's part and even more of an effort to bring to fruition the most difficult source material's spirit.

One only must be as familiar with director Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence to get a general sense of the grinding intellectual prowess he brings to Sky Crawler, although, thankfully, he is a far lighter and more playful here. Where he would relentlessly pound metaphysical principles and analysis at auds in GitS2, he has become mindful that confounding and intricate ideas really can be gotten if a bit of breathing room is given. And the film is more rewarding for that. Oshii's most recognisable hallmark is also front and center in Sky Crawlers; the pet basset hound. If there is anything that will signal this is a Mamoru Oshii creation, it's that.

The gist of things are that an isolated air-base is home to a handful of so-called Kildren, children who fly reconnoissance missions and sometimes engage to protect a very specific portion of territory for an unnamed Alliance. Did I mention they don't age? They fly until they die. And if they encounter an axis pilot dubbed "The Teacher" they most certainly will. The story begins, and exists, primarily around a boy who arrives at the base with an unnatural interest in his own lost memories. Soon the history of his superior officer, a girl no older than himself, weighs on him. She knows more that she lets on and by her demeanor he begins to discover a past between them that shouldn't exist. In fact, even his fellow pilots, all three of them, are nonchalant about their boss, as well as the reasons they fly in the first place. But this is what they do and it's alright with them. Not to mention the group of adults that service their planes but maintain a removed attitude toward the Kildren.

It's really a slow-burner of a film and very confined in its scope, while at the same time offering commentary on issues from the futility of war itself to the virtue of participation and the metaphorical and actual killing of innocence, all without, as I mentioned, lecturing or flooding us with so much dialogue and theory that you want to dunk your head into a tub of ice water. But it is rewarding enough. And a visual treat to boot.