Writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with this movie, “Cloud,” along with his 50-minuter horror-thriller revisionist “Chime” and the French remake of “Serpent’s Path” to treat the audiences waiting for him for four years since his period-thriller, “Wife of a Spy.” Genre-bending may be a good cinephiliac way to describe “Cloud”, but what Kurosawa achieves in this movie is not to merely bend and shift, but to stack genres one after the other. Or more accurately, to chain genres, in a way that his treatment goes back and forth after each one.
Cloud is screening at Hawai’i International Film Festival
Similar to the decision to have “Chime” run at merely short of an hour, the genre-chain is gutsy, risky, and at times imbalanced. But it is tricky over all: are we to trust Mr. Kurosawa because he is Mr. Kurosawa to treat his film in this way and not fail? But if there is anything about Kiyoshi Kurosawa the filmmaker that we admire, it is this very attitude that pushes the constraints of narrative and genre filmmaking to surprising ends. But he may have gone too far with “Cloud,” and that’s really putting it conservatively.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how its protagonist is not even a morally ambiguous anti-hero, but an outright reprehensible nuisance. For the most part, we follow Ryosuke (Masaki Suda), an apathetic salaryman who moonlights as an abusive online reseller. He is introduced in a way that he can never gain sympathy from his audience: the movie opens with a scene where he buys 30 sets of medical machines for less than 100 thousand yen for the whole lot, and resells them at 200 thousand yen each. It could have been any other item, but Kurosawa the writer intentionally opens the scene with the protagonist opportunistically exploiting people in need of medical attention to make his point clear: this guy is a scum.
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There seems to be a continuation between “Chime” and “Cloud” in terms of the tone that is being established. Suda performs his Ryosuke similar to the demeanor as Mutsuo Yoshioka‘s Matsuoka in “Chime”: eyes drained of all sense of goodness and expressiveness and similarly treats people they interact with transactionally. Suda’s performance may look like bad acting if not seen as a design for a personality, which can easily be seen if we are to compare the expressiveness of Yoshiyoshi Arakawa‘s Takimoto or even the net-cafe-dwelling Miyake (Amane Okayama).
As the story unfolds with Ryosuke’s questionable activities, we meet his boss Takimoto who seems to have a lot of faith in him; Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), his girlfriend who seems to stick around because of money; and Sano (Daiken Okudaira) an assistant he hired when he moves into a bigger house outside of the city to focus on his reselling.
These encounters lead the film to change depending on the gravity of the dealings our reseller has with other players. “Cloud”’s genre-chain links between beats that are carried by the characters. At one point, those who have been wronged by Ratil, Ryosuke’s online avatar, make moves against him. The swindler drama from the first act shifts to stalker thriller as Ratil’s victims find out his true identity and start harassing him at his new home. The harassment eventually escalates to a home invasion attack, to a chase, and then, an action-thriller with explosive shootouts.
A Kiyoshi Kurosawa gunfire-actioneer? That’s the kicker. But then again, it’s not just an action movie, but also a home invasion thriller, a stalker thriller, and a swindler drama. This linkages of treatment is reminiscent of another “minor” title in his filmography, “Real” from 2013 that seems to shape-shift from a thriller to a monster fantasy. But a more striking similarity is how the use of green screen whenever the characters are inside a moving vehicle is done in a way that breaks the suspension of disbelief that, in effect, gives out a surreal tone.
Now, we are given a protagonist not to be sympathized with, a treatment that breaks our expectations, and pushes to break cinematic illusion. Is Kiyoshi Kurosawa anti-cinematic? He may be so. But the flip-side of “Cloud”’s “anti-cinema” is a productive chain where attempts for breaking and delinking bring out new experiences to uncover. This is ultimately refreshing. Considering that imaginations of “newness” in cinematic forms are often given to technologies outside of the theatrical space — the so-called “expanded cinema”, this film has the audacity to propose novelty within the very limitation of the two dimensional screen.
