Confessions

May 2012
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Tetsuya Nakashima, director of Kamikaze Girls, Memories Of Matsuko, and writer of Lala Pipo, returns with a psychological thriller…

Within moments of announcing this will be her last day, homeroom teacher Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu, K-20: The Legend of the Black Mask, The Hidden Blade) reveals that her daughter has died… and that two students in her class are responsible.

So begins Confessions, a multilayered adaptation of Kanae Minato’s bestselling novel about a teacher’s revenge and the dark admissions of other students that reveal bullying, juvenile crime and culminate in a school bombing plot.

It seems bleak, sometimes almost relentlessly, in its approach to storytelling – a stark contrast to Nakashima’s other work like Nakashima’s other work like Kamikaze Girls or Memories Of Matsuko. These films may have touched on darker themes, but always found redemption even in the saddest or most ordinary of lives.

The first confession from Moriguchi, for instance, where she tells of her how she discovered her students identity and set about her course of revenge, is played out unremittingly against a backdrop of fading edits and a building score by experimental rock band Boris. Compelling but uncomfortable, this is just the book’s first chapter (originally a short story in its own right before it was completed).

And yet the speed of the edits, and the ease with which the director drops in various cultural references, is pure Nakashima. Though much darker than previous efforts – even the colours are less saturated – thematically we are on familiar ground too. Not least because as the work was adapted from a female writer, this once again puts a strong female lead at the centre of his film.

Here the character is given a solid, if unsympathetic performance by Takako Matsu, a stark contrast to the comic gusto of her appearance in K-20. She’s cold and calculating, manipulating her students and colleagues in order to get vengeance in such a fashion as to make her as unforgivable as those she sets out to punish. This highlights one of the films few flaws, though, that none of the characters are particularly sympathetic and therefore easy to like, though my impression was Nakashima wanted his audience to distance themselves from the characters on screen, as none of them truly act in a way that deserves much empathy.

With the teacher’s references to the perpetrators of the crime as Student A and B, British audiences may be reminded of the James Bulger case in the early 90s. Whether this was an influence on the original work or not, there’s no doubt the heinous, and ultimately senseless, nature of the child’s murder by those who are still children themselves has too many similarities to be ignored.

It is, of course, playing with the most unthinkable of crimes, that our children could indeed be capable of such a thing. And the mix of teen angst and murderous thoughts echo those in Battle Royale, seeming a perfect backdrop for exaggerating the lengths that teens will go to get noticed.

It looks, as you might expect, amazing. I particularly liked the use of curved mirrors, as if in some way Nakashima is alluding to these characters and the distortion of how they are perceived by others and how they want to be perceived. Set in a very modern school of text messages and internet blogs, you almost wonder if he might be trying to tell us something about the YouTube generation our need to each be recognised and famous.

While the episodic, overlapping nature of the film might resemble that of Lala Pipo, the use of title cards for the names of the confessors put me more in mind of Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On series. Nakashima makes good use of the overlapping of stories and timelines to reveal, bit by bit, the mystery and the motivations of his characters.

The film moves towards a rather over the top conclusion which, though not uncommon for Japanese literature (take the work of Kuji Suzuki for example), probably works better in print than it does on screen. It’s still a well-constructed, superbly-paced film that shows Nakashima’s increasing versatility as a director.

Chosen as Japan’s entry to Best Foreign Language film in the Oscars, this may have lost out on the final nod from the Academy, but that shouldn’t stop you from missing it!

Confessions is released on two-disc DVD and single-disc Blu-ray on 25th April.

DVD details

Distributor: Third Window Films (UK)

The DVD edition comes with a good transfer of film and sound. As with Third Window's special edition release of Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls this comes backed with good bonus material, particularly a 70 minute documentary 'Final Confessions' with the director and cast and crew, featuring informative interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. There's also an on-set video confessions feature with the young actors playing the students.

Third Window's release packs little punch on the presentation level, having a minimal, not actually particularly nicely designed menus and an odd running order to the content (ahem, trailers above 70-minute docs?).

One Comment to “Confessions”

[...] Returner) who loves her grandson to Yoshino’s arrogant boyfriend Keigo Masuo (Masaki Okada, Confessions, Life Back Then) to her grief stricken and vengeful father Yoshio (Akira Emoto, Ichi, Memories of [...]
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