Of the young scene of Japanese cinema, we generally know little, as its production reaches us in dribs and drabs. It is therefore a chance to see landing on the screens, united in a double program, two feature films signed by a name still unknown to the battalion. Born in Tokyo in 1981, Tetsuya Mariko is not exactly a beginner: active for nearly twenty years, he received the prize for best emerging director at Locarno in 2016 for Destruction Babies. Essay transformed two years later with BecomingFather (2018), the whole composing a brawling diptych, whose unprecedented pugnacity called for a meeting with their author.
It is an understatement to say that the man who appears, from Tokyo, in the videoconference window, bears little resemblance to the fury of his films: with an Olympian calm and concentration, which only comes to be tempered, in its streetwear connotation , his logo cap pressed down on his head. “Since childhood, I have always loved watching movies, he says. I started making them when I was a student, not with the idea of making it my job, but rather to have fun with my friends. I had a taste for short films in super-8 [ancien format de pellicule à usage domestique], totally self-produced, but which I had the chance to show at festivals in Japan. »
After a first salvo of studies of letters, it is at the Image Forum, a Japanese private school with an experimental tendency, that Mariko learns to handle the super-8, and gets noticed with two short films of autobiographical vein: The Far Eastern Apartment (2003) and The 30 Pirates of Mariko (2004), both of which had great festival runs. First success after which he resumed studies in 2007, refining his training at the University of Cinematographic Arts in Tokyo. He turns there Yellow Kid (2009), his graduation film and first feature film, which will also travel abroad.
Fist without cause
Destruction Babies started from a visit to Matsuyama, a coastal town in the prefecture of Ehime, in the south of the Archipelago. “I was going there for reasons unrelated to the production of the film, he specifies. There, I met a man who told me about his youth and the fact that he had fought a lot. What I heard was absolutely unbelievable. Seeing the state of his hands, very damaged, I understood that his story was authentic. I started going to Matsuyama regularly to listen to him and then write a script inspired by his story. » The film chronicles this fight without cause of a teenager who begins to distribute blows around, without stopping.
You have 36.37% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.