THE DRUDGERY TRAIN (Kueki ressha) C+
Japan (113 mi) 2012
d: Nobuhiro Yamashita
While director Yamashita is perhaps best known for his indie
hit LINDA, LINDA, LINDA (2005), an upbeat teenage story about an all-girl high
school band, this is about as far away from that film as you can get, perhaps
reverting back to his early films which were studies in deadpan absurdity
featuring fringe, loser characters who might also be called slackers. Adapted by Shinki Imaoka, this coming-of-age story is based
on the Akutagawa Prize winning novel by Kenta Nishimura, a somewhat
autobiographical look at a Junior High drop out, Kanta (Mirai Moriyama), who becomes
an unskilled manual laborer spending much of his spare time as a prized
customer in sex for hire clubs. While
admittedly, this is a well made film, the subject matter is often gross and
sensationalist, often uncomfortably so, with pee and fart jokes that may not be
for everyone. There were plenty of
walkouts during the screening, with some people shaking their heads
afterwards. Part of the problem is the
sympathetic portrayal of an uneducated sex fiend, the son of a convicted sex
criminal forced to leave school early to support himself, who is such a maladjusted
social deviant, one wonders what the original attraction is to the
material? The rhythm of life is well established,
especially the dreariness of the daily work routines, where at some point Kanta
meets a friend, Shoji (Kengo Koura), a student in vocational school, quickly becoming
drinking buddies. Shoji is more
mannered, watches what he does or says, and remains somewhat embarrassed to go
to sex clubs, but acquiesces out of friendship, while Kanta is raunchy and
completely down to earth with no filter whatsoever, thinking his perverse sexual views
are completely normal.
With Shoji’s assistance, Kanta meets the woman of his
dreams, an extremely cute, used book store clerk Yasuko (Atsuko Maeda, from THE
SUICIDE SONG (2007), who surprisingly agrees to be his friend, though they are
polar opposites. She is thoughtful and
kind, expressing a gentle nature, while he’s more of a brute completely lacking
in social skills, literally driving everyone away with his crude nature. Their relationship is more a disaster waiting
to happen, but initially, after a dreadful beginning, the film takes a near
illusory turn, where the three of them have a swimming sequence that is a pure
joy and delight, behaving like little kids. Nonetheless, the film is grounded in the
monotony of work, where Kanta is well aware of his educational shortcomings,
leaving him few job opportunities and destined, apparently, to live in tiny,
over priced cubicles for apartments.
When Shoji finds an intelligent and attractive girlfriend at school, his
time with Kanta is more limited, who only worsens the situation by going on a
thoroughly despicable drunken outburst with the couple that leaves him utterly
humiliated, which only isolates him even more, which is followed by even more
dreadful behavior with Yasuko. Devastated
and alone, Kanta has driven away any semblance of friendship, which becomes
even more excruciatingly painful when he encounters a former childhood girlfriend
as a sex worker. The scene spiralling out
of control into near farce reflects his own inner chaos, continually prone to
violence, where his self-destructive streak literally defines his life. The film is bookended by deadpan storefront
sequences in front of a sex club, accompanied by a strange musical arrangement
by Shinco of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which is apparently very
popular in Japan as a child’s nursery rhyme, where the same melody is given
different lyrics, altering the meaning of the song from the drudgery of menial
labor to a journey of happiness.
