Can we, out of fidelity, arrange an exit from history that is a way of perpetuating for ourselves, in a corner of our head and our heart, a destiny of the world that has become impossible? This is the dizzying question and, at the same time, very intimately linked to the experience of the cinema spectator, a fortiori festival-goer, that we ask Onoda, Arthur Harari’s second feature film after Black Diamond (2016), who came to offer themselves in splendid opening of the section Un certain regard, little sister of the Cannes competition. Difficult to find in the well-filled ranks of the French contingent a film less resembling the French production than this one, which speaks Japanese and relates an obscure and fascinating episode of the war in the Pacific.
The film looks, in fact, on the real case of a Japanese soldier, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, dispatched in 1944 to an island in the Philippines to wage a “secret war” there, and who, in the absence of any information or contact with the outside world, remained in defense formation, first with his battalion, then little by little on his own, until 1974, almost thirty years after the end of hostilities. Mind-boggling and yet very real story of the last Japanese soldier to ever surrender, which sparks a thousand fictional dreams. Harari films it with assurance and poise, like that of a counter-order which, for want of having been enacted in time, will only arrive several decades late.
Loyal soldier, obeying protocol, Onoda joins the diamond dealer played by Nils Schneider in Black Diamond in the category of “good sons”, attached to a father figure. No wonder the film is too. ” My father, confides the filmmaker, who read a lot about lonely sailors and knew I wanted to make an adventure film, told me about the many soldiers who remained after the defeat on the islands of the Pacific. It was from there that I started researching. I felt that I was digging up not a simple one “subject”, but a buried, very deep relationship with childhood: what stories and even delirium in fiction are for me. “
“A real production challenge”
As the finest works are delirious together, Onoda is a two-headed bet between Harari and the producer Nicolas Anthomé who follows him since his short films, shot between 2005 and 2013. “When I spoke about this idea to Nicolas, he explains, smirk, he had not yet produced any fictional feature films. We were a little above ground! It excited him to build a sort of impossible prototype, to embark on a real production challenge. Nicolas is also very inspired by great examples of producers strangely forgotten today, such as Serge Silberman, Pierre Braunberger or Anatole Dauman. Great adventurers too. “
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