SPELLBOUND

The theme of Masato Harada's Spellbound is nothing less than the iron triangle of business, bureaucracy and underworld gangs that have dominated the history of postwar Japan. With a plot that reads like a newspaper investigative series, the film risks being flattened into the cinematic equivalent of good, gray journalese. Harada, however, has injected a visual dynamism and narrative pace that is very Hollywood, while respecting the integrity of a story that is, in its complexity and ambiguity, very Japanese. Also, while being unsparing and unsentimental in its portrayal of institutional crime and corruption, Spellbound presents a group portrait considerably more attractive that the usual foreign image of Japanese businessmen as nerdy drones. It was also proved attactive to Japanese audiences, which made it a solid hit, and to the critical panel of Kinema Junpo magazine, which named it one of the ten best films of 1999. When a major bank is caught paying off a corporate extortionist, the media and prosecutors begin to dig, breaking open a money-and-favors scandal that threatens to rock the entire structure of business and government, to its foundations. While the bank's top executives continue to vacillate and obfuscate, a quartet of middle-management reformers, led by straight-arrow Kitano, decide to stage a boardroom coup and install a new, clean management team. With the aid of a hotshot news anchor and a hard-nosed prosecutor, heads begin to roll. But the reformers hit a roadblock in the form of a crusty former chairman, who happens to be Kitano's father-in-law.