Hitoshi (Kamenashi Kazuya), the electronics store clerk hero of Miki Satoshi’s It’s Me, It’s Me (Ore Ore) gets more than he bargains for when he attempts the title scam. Using the cellphone an obnoxious fellow customer leaves behind in a fast food joint, he calls the customer’s mother, poses as her son Daiki in a jam – and persuades her to transfer 900,000 yen to his depleted bank account.
From this point, It’s Me, It’s Me could have easily gone the route of quirky comedy, one that Miki, a comedy specialist throughout his long TV and film career, has often taken, with results ranging from the scatter-shot to the spew-your-popcorn funny.
Instead, Hitoshi not only has a bizarre encounter with his victim, who calls him “Daiki” and treats him as her real-life, flesh-and-blood son, but runs into a stern-faced doppelganger who claims to be Hitoshi and calls him an imposter. Soon, to his bafflement and horror, yet another double, this one on the wild and crazy side, pops up, The three “Hitoshis” eventually meet and form a club, which makes a sort of bizarre sense since they have a lot in common.
The original Hitoshi (if he is indeed the “original”) gamely adapts to his new circumstances and even finds advantages in being one of triplets, but the strangeness escalates with the emergence of “defective” Hitoshi copies and deterioration of everyday reality (or rather Hitoshi’s version of it) into a surreal nightmare.
Then the copies begin vanishing and people around the “original,” including a sexy, mysterious customer named Sayaka (Uchida Yuki) and his hectoring, overly familiar boss Tajima (Kase Ryo) become sucked into the mad vortex that is his world.
Based on a prize-winning novel by Hoshino Tomoyuki, It’s Me, It’s Me is reminiscent of Being John Malkovich, the 1999 Spike Jonze film about an unemployed puppeteer who discovers a portal into actor John Malkovich’s brain. When in the course of the story, Malkovich himself enters the portal, he emerges into a world populated by other Malkovichs, who can only say “Malkovich.” In other words, the ultimate narcissistic hell.
But what is a minor motif in Jonze’s film is a major one is Miki’s. Filmed with a cheerful disregard for grass-is-green logic, it may send the more emotionally fragile or rigidly rational hurtling toward the exits. There is a lot to process, like gazing into an infinite recession of mirrors in your local funhouse.
But Miki, who also wrote the script, maintains the same fine, tight control over his mind-bending material as did in his 2007 masterpiece Adrift in Tokyo (which screened at FEFF). As in the previous film, he weaves in deeper themes, as well as a wealth of dryly funny sight gags, into his slight story, but with more abandon and ambition, as though he were trying to not only out-Jonze Jonze, but out-Kafka Kafka, who may have transformed his salesman hero Gregor Samsa into a giant bug in his novella The Metamorphosis, but at least did not clone the poor sod into infinity.
Mark Schilling