Fresh graduate from Kyoto Zokei University, Daichi Murase was the winner of the Audience Award at NARA-wave Student Film Competition where his debut feature “Roll” premiered in September. Produced with his fellow students, the movie is a playful love letter to films and life.
Roll is streaming at SF Indiefest
Young reserved Yoshihiro (Shingo Nakayama) is a bit hikikomori and a bit otaku. He is not completely recluse, he gets out and works occasionally for a company that collects rejected appliances and objects, but he is not into socialising, as opposed to his dorm-mates who spend most of the time smoking, chatting and eating conbini food. He is also totally absorbed by his hobby; in the safety of his room, Yoshihiro likes taking apart the objects he finds while working, and explore their innards. He religiously unscrews all the pieces and arranges them on the tatami where – once finished – he lays happy and ready to sleep in his cocoon of metal scraps.
One day, Yoshihiro and his colleagues are called to empty a garage at a house in the countryside where a big pile of discarded objects is waiting for them. It's a job that requires time and later in the day, in a moment of break, Yoshihiro hears some noise beyond a door locked from outside with a chain. Inside, he finds a weird room with barred windows and a whole wall of video monitors. On the bed, a mysterious object he has never seen before, an 8mm camera. A bizarre goggle-&-boiler-suit-wearing girl called Nazuni (Ami Sugihara) is the owner of the room, who happily lends the camera to Yoshihiro.
At home with his precious and alien object, he tries to understand how it works and what to make of it. When his dorm-mate (Iori Miyamoto) points out it might be a video camera, they decide to ask an old filmmaker to explain how it works and what film reels are. Immediately the dorm-mate wants to make a film, he even has some scripts ready, one about psychopath signals and one about exploding mushrooms, but Yoshihiro has other plans; above all, going to free Nazuni.
In his first feature, Daichi Murase chooses to build up the tension with the aid of delicate hints and sensations. Undoubtedly a slow-burner, “Roll” introduces its protagonist as a socially distant young man with a morbid love for hoarding and exploring mechanical objects, feeling more comfortable with pieces of metal than with humans (a nod to “Tetsuo”, maybe?) and grows more disquieting after the first encounter between Yoshihiro and Nazuni. The mystery that surrounds the girl is rather unsettling; we earlier saw her father giving away to the garbage company something suggesting the mother might have died after an illness and we know the father held her in a chained room. The narration doesn't delve into it but it's enough to conjure up a sense of malaise around Nazuni's environment and her captivity. However, the mood reverses completely when Yoshihiro is ready to leave the comfort of his nest of nuts and bolts, and makes the bold move of kidnapping Nazuni and running away with her. With freedom, Nazuni and the videocamera, Yoshihiro's horizons become wider and wild.
In this Yoshihiro's coming of age tale, the super-8 camera acts as a trigger, not just for filmmaking but in a more allegorical way, for embracing the unknown with a sense of adventure. In fact, the final part of “Roll”, following Yoshihiro and Nazuni's escape, is joyfully surreal and full of energy, free from chains and bad vibes. Nazuni, like a film roll, is sensitive to light but overexposure is – metaphorically – what makes life worth living. To add to its liberating madness, this part alternates media like video, 16mm and 8mm in a carousel of whimsical shots.
With a good use of the limited budget the film preserves its roughness and integrates it in the whole, making it part of the appeal. Shingo Nakayama's performance is brilliant, showing Yoshihiro's sweet mix of vulnerability and determination delineated by the script from Murase's fellow student Hibiki Terasawa. The rest of the crew are also fellow students of Kyoto Zokei University.
Playful and a bit bonkers, “Roll” has raw energy and vision. It is what a good first film should be.
