Black comedies about dysfunctional families are common in Japan, from Ishii Sogo's anarchic The Crazy Family (Gyakufunsha Kazoku, 1984) to Miike Takashi's batty The Happiness Of The Katakuris (Katakurike No Kofuku, 2001). Funuke, Show Some Love You Losers! (Funuke Domo, Kanashimi No Ai O Misero) is the latest in this loopy line. This first feature by Yoshida Daihachi has a clever script, talented cast, vivid characters and, as might be expected from a veteran CM director, visual goodies, including an inspired sequence in which real life bounces into manga.
It also veers from sitcom yoks to kitchen-sink-drama shocks. These shifts in tone and style are carefully calculated - Yoshida wants to make, not just a laugh fest, but an unblinking examination of how families can become festering swamps of crushed hopes, suppressed rage and sexual deviance. Was he inspired by similar examinations by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Noah Baumbach (The Squid And The Whale)? No telling, though Yoshida's script is based on a novel by Motoya Yukiko.
What is clear, though, is the brilliance of Nagasaku Hiromi as a strenuously strange housewife - a role that won her nearly every Best Supporting Actress prize in Japan. Even so the fun comes mixed with unsettling revelations, like taking a bus trip with a gorgeous, if ditzy, woman and learning that she not only has an incestuous relationship with her brother, but has carved his forehead into a checker board. You might feel like making an unscheduled stop, no?
Or you might make an exception for Sato Eriko, who played a superpowered robot in the SF-romp Cutey Honey and a child-abusing teacher in the horror The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Kuchisaki Onna). Babelicious in the former role, a good screamer in the latter, Sato gives a more fleshed-out (forgive the pun) performance as a failed actress.
Sato is Wago Sumika, who returns to her home in rural Japan for the funeral of her parents, killed in a freak road accident. There she meets her mousy little sister, Kyomi (Satsukawa Aimi), who works at an unnamed part-time job in town, her sullen big brother, Shinji (Nagase Masatoshi), who is a wood-cutter, and his new bride, Machiko (Nagasaku). A frantically cheery loner who has exiled herself from Tokyo to the boonies in pursuit of a normal family life, Machiko finds herself, instead, a bystander in a sibling war, with strange, dangerous undercurrents that surprise and appall her in various measures - though she never loses her chirpy manner and eagerness to smooth things over in the name of "family harmony."
The battle lines, however, were drawn long before Machiko arrived on the scene. Four years ago, Sumika was quarreling with her hard-headed father over her dream to go to Tokyo and become an actress. Words turned to violence - and left Shinji with a scarred forehead and the traumatized Kyomi, then 14, with the desire to draw the family drama in manga form. She submitted her finished work, depicting Sumika as a latter-day Lucrezia Borgia, to a horror comic and won a newcomer's prize. The whole village devoured Kyomi's roman a clef, leading to Sumika's abrupt departure.
Now she is back, dead broke, to claim her share of the inheritance and is angered to learn from Shinji that the money is not forthcoming. Soon after, she is dumped by her manager. Naturally, she takes out her disappointment on Kyomi, who is still drawing on the sly. Then Sumika reads in a magazine that a famous director is looking for a "new type of heroine" for his next film, which will be on the theme of "communication." She decides to communicate with him by letter - and is overjoyed when she gets a reply, with the hint of a role. Will all finally be forgiven and Machiko's dream of a happy, loving family come true?
The root problems of the Wago clan run too deep and weird to admit an easy solution, however. To begin with, the three women are all infected with the artistic virus: Sumika is obsessed with acting, Kyomi with drawing and Machiko with making bizarre dolls out of yarn, buttons and other household scraps. All three are dreamers, unsatisfied with the status quo - and all three are punished for it. Stolid Shinji, whose idea of recreation is a nightly bottle of beer, seems immune from the feminine madness swirling around him - but he's not. He is, in fact, the most vulnerable of all.
The film's most watchable bits, however, are Nagasaku's hilariously twitchy reactions to humiliations and outrages, which elevate the local art of self abasement - and the universal art of the double take to a new level. She deserves a film or, better yet, TV show of her own: Desperate Housewives - Japan Style.
Mark Schilling