Rating:
Director: Akihiko Shiota
Producer: Hiroyuki Negishi, Takashi Hirano
Writer: Yayoi Kiyono
Director of Photography: Tokusho Kikumura
Cast: Aoi Miyazaki, Seiichi Tanabe, Ryo
Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew
| HARMFUL
INSECT Rating: Director: Akihiko Shiota Producer: Hiroyuki Negishi, Takashi Hirano Writer: Yayoi Kiyono Director of Photography: Tokusho Kikumura Cast: Aoi Miyazaki, Seiichi Tanabe, Ryo Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Warren
Curry
6/26/02
The Japanese film Harmful Insect proves that teenage alienation is not a problem that's restricted to just the United States. We also learn that Japanese filmmakers, much like their American counterparts, can produce very mediocre movies about this issue. While I will definitely concede that director Akihiko Shiota has made a well-intended, thoughtful film, Harmful Insect is mainly stalled by its inability to become more than the sum of its parts. The movie's only purpose appears to be to capture a very glum atmosphere, but it seems uninterested in exploring its characters with a greater amount of depth. Combine this narrow approach with a tortoise like pace and Harmful Insect, ultimately, becomes a chore to sit through.
Dispirited 13-year-old Sachiko (Aoi Miyazaki) leads quite the dreadful life. Her mother attempted suicide after Sachiko's father left the family, and the girl's somewhat of an outcast at school, due to a rumor floating around that she had an affair with a teacher. A teenager who has both a miserable home and school life, usually becomes a depressed one, and Sachiko is no different. She stops attending school and befriends an older boy, who makes money by duping motorists into believing they have hit him while he's walking on the street, but then usually loses the money to thugs that make him the victim of their savage attacks. She also keeps company with an older, street urchin, who eventually assists Sachiko in performing random acts of vandalism.
When Sachiko returns to school and tries to restore some sort of normalcy to her life, the attempt is too late, even though she becomes friends with a classmate and starts a relationship with a male student. She finds no comfort anywhere, and an incident that occurs involving her mother's new boyfriend makes her situation even bleaker.
If you couldn't tell by now, this movie is an emotional downer. A perpetual black cloud hangs over every frame, but the film's mood, at least, remains consistent until near the end. One pivotal scene digresses into forced melodrama, which is at odds with the prevalent tone Shiota worked so hard to establish, and when Sachiko decides that she'll vent her teen angst by playing with Molotov cocktails, the movie feels like it's almost completely lost its way.
Technically, the film is well made and wisely constructed visually, but it's relentlessly cold and humorless and never earns the right to make its audience feel so bad. I don't need to necessarily like Sachiko for the movie to work, but her confliction didn't grab me at all -- we're just never given an honest chance to see what's ticking inside this character. Disenfranchised youth have made a fascinating movie topic in a vast number of films before, however, Harmful Insect is simply too much of a bore to join such esteemed company.
(Screened at the 2002 Los Angeles Film
Festival)
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