Ever since “DANGAN Runner” the filmography of Hiroyuki Tanaka or Sabu has been defined by themes such as fate, destiny and coincidence, and how these affect our daily lives. Whether it is the salarymen in “Monday” or the bankrobbers in “Unlucky Monkey”, bizarre events, blended with a certain talent of the character for being clumsy and somewhat pedestrian at times, result in strange and often quite absurd development, which challenge the character's greatest fears. In more recent films such as “Dancing Mary” Sabu has also (re-)implemented the idea of spirituality within the narratives of his movies, considering how our ways of defining our lives may even affect our well-being for good or worse. In “My Blood and Bones in a Flowing Galaxy”, whose cinematic release in 2020 had to be postponed due to the pandemic, he combines these aforementioned themes within a story which also deals with the topic of bullying in school in a movie that is both a teenage drama and a thriller.
My Blood and Bones in a Flowing Galaxy is screening at Nippon Connection
While his classmates are busy learning for their final exams at high school and making plans for their future, senior student Kiyozumi (Taishi Nakagawa) has already decided what he wants to become. A hero. The idea has been on his mind ever since he heard the story about his father's death, who drowned on his way to the hospital, where his son was about to be born, while rescuing a family from a car that drove into a river bed. All his life, Kiyozumi has been waiting for a chance to actually become the kind of hero his father was until one day, during a meeting at his school's assembly hall, he receives an opportunity to fulfill his destiny. As he observes a junior student, Hari (Anna Ishii), being viciously bullied and ridiculed by her classmates, he decides to intervene and help her.
Even though the young girl's reaction is anything but positive at first, she eventually opens up to the senior student who seems to have honest intentions, and she talks to him about her ordeal in her class which has been going on for quite some time at this point. Apart from repeatedly intervening on her behalf, Kiyozumi also carefully advises her on how to change her behavior and be more confident, which, much to Hari's surprise not only helps a little bit but also grants her the attention of another girl in her class, who is fed up about the way Hari is being treated. However, when Kiyozumi get to know Hari's father (Shinichi Tsutsumi) he learns that the core of his friend's problem lies somewhere else and is quite sinister.
Based on a popular novel by writer Yuyuko Takemiya, Sabu's adaptation of the source material blends the themes of bullying and heroism with the concepts of spirituality and destiny. Similar to the heroes in “Monday” or “Drive” the memory of the father, and the idea of being a hero is both, a cherished idea as well as a heavy burden for Kiyozumi, especially given his age and his lack of experience with the adult world. The image of alien spaceships flying over the character's heads, which Hari explains to her bewildered new friend during their first longer conversation, is quite an inventive and clever way of stressing how the past and a certain (self-)image affects a person. In “My Blood and Bones in a Flowing Galaxy” it becomes a symbol for the kind of isolation which happens as a result of bullying and shows the level of empathy present in the source material as well as the movie.
Portraying social outsiders is one of the strengths of SABU's cinema and his newest feature is no exception to the rule. Thanks to convincing performances by his mostly young cast the story is carried by the believable bond between two outsiders, finding their ways of dealing with isolation and essentially a way to survive, a connection which put to the test in the second half of the movie when it becomes quite clear that bullying is not the only issue defining Hari's life.
Although this shift between two genres and the overall handling of the story's themes is executed quite nicely, “My Blood and Bones in a Flowing Galaxy” shows a problematic tendency in modern Japanese cinema to over-extend its welcome with some scenes going on for too long or being somewhat redundant in the first place.
In the end, “My Blood and Bones in a Flowing Galaxy” is a gripping and even quite suspenseful blend of teenage drama and thriller, especially thanks to its performances and visual approach. Even though his feature could do with a little trimming at times, Sabu again shows his talent in combining contrasting elements, stories and themes into an overall still quite entertaining narrative.
