Better Than Average Bear
Your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who cares. Reach out and touch (tiny) faith.
Debut director Hiroshi Okuyama won the €50,000 Kutxabank New Directors Award at the 66th San Sebastian Film Festival last year and it’s not hard to see why. JESUS (僕はイエス様が嫌い), or it’s more literal translation of I Hate Jesus, is an offbeat dramedy that views faith through the contemporary lens of a small child.
After 9-year-old Yura Hoshino (Yura Sato) moves from Tokyo to a small mountain town following the death of his grandfather, his parents enrol him in a Christian school. Struggling to fit in and find friends, Yura is surprised when he spots a tiny Jesus popping up in front of him in the strangest places.
A meditation on faith and childhood, Okuyama structures his film around small impressionistic leaps through Yura’s observations. It begins with Yura’s grandfather poking holes in the paper shōji windows, and skips through Yura’s alienation of the religious iconography of his new school. Where things get interesting is when the miniature Jesus (played by Australian ex-pat Chad Mullane) starts appearing on a record player, floating on the back of a rubber duck, or on Yura’s school desk.
Sitting in the weird Venn Diagram between the observation of Hirokazu Koreeda, the avant garde of Sion Sono, and the quirkiness of Daigo Matsui, director Okuyama builds on his work that began with the 2009 music video Graduationparty!!!!! and continued across several shorts. What might simply be a strange little film that ostensibly throws shade at religion instead takes a child’s view of Christianity and subverts it.
The film takes a different turn when Yura meets his new best friend Kazuma. There are points where he seems too good to be true, and one wonders if he is even real. Yet he is a byproduct of the positive faith Yura is exhibiting, and when an accident sends Kazuma to the hospital, Yura loses not only his desire to pray but his other small robed messiah as well.
While to would be very easy to get up in arms about the depiction of faith in this film, one always has to remember that this is being viewed through the eyes of a kid in single digits. Okuyama’s measured pace and clearly personal perspective, dedicating the picture to “the friend who passed away too young,” makes this stand out from the crowd and mark the filmmaker as an interesting new voice in Japan’s prolific marketplace.
2018 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Hiroshi Okuyama | WRITERS: Hiroshi Okuyama | CAST: Yura Sato, Riki Okuma, Kazuma Okuma, Yuko Kibiki, Akko Tadano, Kenichi Akiyama, Ippei Osako, Chad Mullane | DISTRIBUTOR: Nikkatsu Corporation (JPN), SFF (AUS)| RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 31 May 2019 (JPN), 14 June 2019 (AUS)
