Moriguchi Yuko (Matsu Takako), the heroine of Nakashima Tetsuya’s pitch-dark drama Confessions (Kokuhaku), teaches a coed class of junior high freshmen, but has given up trying to contain the chaos. Addressing the class on the final day of school, she speaks evenly and precisely — while her talking, texting and otherwise occupied students ignore her existence.
She has a reason for her calm, which resembles the numbness of a trauma victim: She is quitting her job — and taking her revenge on those who have destroyed her life.
Earlier that year her toddler daughter was found floating face down in the school pool. The police ruled the girl’s death by drowning an accident, but Moriguchi believed otherwise and playing detective, unmasked the killers: two boys in her class.
Why doesn’t she turn in the killers to the police? Because they are too young to be tried and convicted. Instead, she plans to revenge her daughter’s death herself, in ways subtle, but sure.
Nakashima, best-known abroad for such colorfully imaginative, blackly comic films as Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari, 2004) and Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no Issho, 2006), does Confessions differently from local genre norm. Fans expecting the usual tear-jerking melodrama or brain-teasing mystery will be disappointed.
Based on a novel by Minato Kanae, Confessions is a typical mystery story in outline, and comments on everything from the dire state of Japanese education to the still-lingering prejudice against AIDS victims.
Nakashima’s treatment turns genre rules on their heads, however. First, he identifies the two killers early on, draining the film of any whodunit tension. Second, Moriguchi is like a ghost, dead to every emotion but vengeful rage. Her hollow-voiced narration makes the incidents she is describing sound as though they are unfolding In another dimension or life.
Lastly, Nakashima films even the most violent scenes with visually elegant stylistics, yet another distancing device. The mother of one of the killers (Kimura Yoshino) is screaming her head off at her son’s latest eruption — he has become a psychotic recluse since his exposure by Moriguchi — but our eyes are invited to focus on the beauty of the desaturated colors, the austere refinement of the composition.
Nakashima’s aim is probe beyond surface dramatics to inner truths, the way Terrence Malick filmed the intrusion of the transcendent into jungle combat in The Thin Red Line. And like Malick his methods are unorthodox, individual and distinctive.
There is no easy catharsis or redemption in Confessions. Instead there is the chill of seeing into the dark heart of evil — and endless grief.