Summary
A visually striking and often mysterious familial drama doesn’t offer any easy answers, but captivates from the first to last frame.
From the opening shot of Anshul Chauhan’s KONTORA (コントラ), crisply shot with Maxim Golomidov’s sumptuous photography, it’s hard not to be captivated by this elegant and mystical spin on the coming-of-age narrative.
Yet where to begin discussing a film that is so much about discovery? It’s ostensibly about Sora (Wan Marui), a young girl who discovers her grandfather’s Second World War diary and begins searching her hometown for a buried secret.
Then there’s the mysterious mute ‘backwards walking man’ (Hidemasa Mase) who wanders into her town. Following a road accident, he’s taken in by Sora and her often angry father (Taichi Yamada). Without saying a word begins to help them uncover the fractured relationship they’ve been cultivating for some time.
Despite the arty shopfront, KONTORA is an extremely traditional narrative of familial angst, sins of the past, and a youth’s search for identity. Yet there’s also the Backwards Walking Man who throws a bit of a spanner into the works. The enigmatic figure, much like the film itself, can’t tell us why he’s there – and it’s almost not important.
Indeed, the title itself offers both clues and more mystery. Written in katakana, the script traditionally used for foreign loan words, it translates as ‘contra’ as in opposite or against. It might be speaking directly to Mase’s character, in that he walks counter to everyone else, or it may be some deeper form of otherness.
Filled with an almost mystical driver, and blindly focused on a trunk buried in the forest by Sora’s grandfather, KONTORA‘s disparate elements are held together by some lush black and white photography and Yuma Koda score. It becomes difficult here to speak to some of the recurring motifs without giving away too much (so I won’t), but nothing feels like it been placed on screen randomly.
It doesn’t all have to make sense, of course, which is the beauty of Chauhan’s second feature. It remains something of a riddle wrapped in an enigma to the final frame, even while it offers both Sora, her father and their visitor a kind of closure. A striking film that will no doubt appear on a few ‘best of’ lists this year.
2019 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Anshul Chauhan| WRITER: Anshul Chauhan | CAST: Wan Marui, Hidemasa Mase, Taichi Yamada, Seira Kojima, Takujo Shimizu| DISTRIBUTOR: JAPAN CUTS (US), Kowatanda Films (JPN) | RUNNING TIME: 143 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 17-30 July 2020 (JAPAN CUTS)
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