Monster

 Everyman

Monster is a complex, demanding but ultimately rewarding psychological drama which engages some fairly challenging ideas with a light touch.

A young school boy, Minato (Soya Kurokawa) reports to his mother (Sakura Ando) that his teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) has been verbally bullying him and even been physically violent. His mother complains to the school and a meeting is arranged with the elderly female principle, but she is met with a stone wall. The teachers agree that there has been a "misunderstanding", there is profuse ritual apology, but Mrs Migono has no sense that her concerns have been addressed.

I am aware that in Japan, bowing is a perfectly normal social greeting, and I think that etiquette may require deeper and longer bows under different circumstances; but I wasn't quite clear if the very deep and prolonged prostration Mr Hori was performing was appropriate under the circumstances, or comically exaggerated. He says things like "I have not provided the correct instruction" and "There was contact between my hand and his nose". Japan is obviously not the same place as the UK, and I was interested in some of the minor cultural differences: the Buddhist shrine in an otherwise westernised suburban flat; conversations about rebirth and reincarnation being a fairly natural way to talk about a deceased parent.

For the first twenty minutes, it seemed fairly clear what kind of direction the movie was going in: a story about the conflict between the mother and the school board, an attempt to get to the truth, presumably with more and more issues being uncovered along the way. The accusations against the teacher become more serious, but there are counter accusations that Minato has been bullying Yori, one of his classmates (Hinata Hiiragi ) -- who is found to have burn marks on his arm.

But then the film takes a surprising structural twist: the screen fades to black (clearly signifying the end of an act) and we wind back to the very beginning of the film. The action repeats; from Mr Hori's point of view. The specific bullying incident turns out to have been entirely innocent -- the teacher accidentally caused a nose bleed while trying to intervene in a fight -- and as the story progresses, all the characters turn out to have multiple levels of secrets. No-one tells the whole truth; no-one communicates straightforwardly with anyone else. There is a third flashback; from the point of view of Yori, the boy who Minato is supposedly bullying. The multiple viewpoints require a fairly substantial amount of concentration: the film relies heavily on us noticing when particular lines of dialogue are repeated. Until leaving the cinema and thinking about it, I don't think I quite got that we were watching three distinct tellings of the same action; as opposed to simply jumping around the timeline and the viewpoint. So, for example: in one scene, there is a brief panic because Yori has disappeared during a teacher-parent meeting; we're told he's merely been to the toilet. But an hour later, we see the same scene again and find that in fact, he'd had a long, intimate conversation with the principle, Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka) who has a pretty dark secret of her own. Up to this point, she's been portrayed as cold-hearted and reserved -- Minato's mother literally accuses her of being inhuman -- but in this scene she comes through as kind and sensitive, with considerable wisdom and a real ability to communicate with kids.

Because the film is so complex, it feels longer than it is. It's one of those movies you can be ninety minutes into and not know whether you are approaching the conclusion or still watching the set-up. I felt that the central sequence in which Minato and Yori play idyllic but slightly disturbing games in a deserted train carriage outstayed its welcome, particularly considering the wibbly wobbly timey wimey structure meant we already knew this was not going to end well.

Perhaps I shouldn't harp on its Japaneseness; but I did feel that if the situation had arisen in America -- or at any rate, in an American movie -- everyone would have been that little bit more prepared to come out and be honest about what was really going on, saving themselves quite a lot of trouble. There is an almost Pinteresque texture of pauses, and silences, and people not saying anything directly. I feel it would certainly reward a second viewing now I know what kind of a film it is.

Given how much I like movies about comic books, I probably ought not to use "novelistic" as a term of praise. Movies aren't meant to be novelistic: they are meant to be cinematic. But I was reminded of Virginia Woolf's comment about Middlemarch: one of the view novels written for grown-up people.

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