With films like “Destruction Babies” and “Miyamoto”, Tetsuya Mariko has really left an impact in the Japanese movie industry during the latest years, as one of the few remaining directors of ‘tense cinema', as established by directors such as Takashi Miike, Sion Sono, Toshiaki Toyoda and Shinya Tsukamoto. Now, with “Before Anyone Else”, he attempts to take his talents outside Japan, to the US specifically, hopefully in a new endeavor and not because he cannot find space in his home country anymore.
Before Anyone Else is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival
In black-and-white and low definition, the movie begins with a young woman driving a car, getting out of it, and then the camera turning to the backseat, showing a baby sitting there. The next cut shows a completely different scene, in color this time, where a group of four Americans and Asian Americans break into a pawn shop. Two of them, a boy and a girl, Jimmy and Lex, escape with a bag full of stolen goods, and ride away on their skateboards discussing if they want to go to California. Eventually, they have have a fateful encounter with an abandoned car in an empty lot. Inside the car are two things: a small child in the backseat and a gun in the glove compartment. Soon they meet their “comrades” and Jimmy wants to sell the gun. Expectedly, things don't go well.
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Tetsuya Mariko directs a very bleak short, with the coloring, the wind and the cold being the main medium of this atmosphere, which is heightened by the fact that the protagonists are from broken homes, and trauma and illogicality seem to dictate their decisions. Jimmy in particular seems completely out of control, while his girlfriend and her treatment of the kid cements the overall approach here in the most impactful fashion. The “Shoplifters” vibe is also quite evident, although the overall bleakness and the change of setting move the movie much away from Koreeda's film. Lastly, the ending brings the whole thing together nicely, in a rather impactful fashion.
Yasuyuki Sasaki's cinematography is quite interesting. There is a security footage scene, some very interesting frames, a TV shot that adds some info about what is happening, a number of long, panning shots, and some close ups eventually, all of which are quite well implemented here, adding to the overall bleakness, along with the coloring. Ryoma Hirata's editing results in a relative fast pace that suits the overall aesthetics here. However, the low budget of the short does become quite evident after a fashion, particularly in the exterior sound and the visuals, although not to a point to bring the whole thing down.
Akiyo Komatsu as Jimmy and Chloe Skoczen as Lex play their characters with an excessiveness that does not work at all for the film, with the delivery of the lines, particularly when they are angry, being utterly unconvincing, in probably the movie's biggest issue.
As a first attempt at something different, “Before Anyone Else” is not bad, but considering what we have seen before from Mariko, this short definitely appear subpar, even if the story and particularly the ending, compensate to a large degree.
