In such films as A Stranger of Mine (2005) and After School (2008) Uchida Kenji created scintillating comedy from original scripts that played with time, identity – and the audience’s mind. Topping himself with each outing has been no easy trick: Uchida needed nearly four years to put his new film Key of Life on the screen, with much of the time devoted to writing yet another ingenious script from scratch.
The basic premise might not be so new – two men, one a slovenly failure, the other a tightly disciplined success, trade identities. The fresh twist is that the latter one has no say-so in the swap – and no way of knowing that his new self is not his real one.
The former one, Sakurai (Sakai Masato), is still at the bottom rung of the acting profession, despite years of trying. (Given his recent lack of roles, it hard to say he is even on the ladder.) Finally reaching the end of his rope, he decides to end it all, but first goes to the neighborhood public bath. (He may not, like James Dean, pledge to leave a beautiful corpse, but he doesn’t want to leave a dirty one.)
There Sakurai witnesses Kondo (Kagawa Teruyuki), a hitman who has just finished a job, slip and bang his head on the wet floor, knocking him unconscious. On an impulse he takes Kondo’s locker key – and substitutes his own.
When Kondo comes to, he has no memory of the accident or anything else, including his identity. But the locker key offers a clue and, after examining “his” ID and firetrap apartment, Kondo concludes that he is Sakurai – and that he’d better get his life in order. Which he proceeds to do with the diligence and thoroughness he brought to his previous profession.
Meanwhile, Sakurai is delighted to learn that Kondo is rolling in wealth and living like a king (or rather a prince of the underworld). But his mood soon changes to terror and desperation when he is contacted via cellphone by a gangster client (Arakawa YosiYosi) – and is given a job he can’t refuse.
There are, of course, major improbabilities with this set-up that the average scriptwriter would have resolved with broad farce – or turned to hash. Uchida, however, not only makes his story feel plausible within its own (admittedly artificial) parameters, but transforms it into something more than a well-made puzzle.
What truly separates the Kondos and Sakurais? Character, says the film, is the key to unlocking life’s possibilities, even if one is dealt a bad hand otherwise – and Kondo’s hand is about as bad as it gets. This has been the view of many a self-made man (or woman) – and the film is not completely unsympathetic to it. There is something inspiring, as well as funny, in Kondo’s dogged determination to put his (that is, Sakurai’s) life back on track.
It is also touching when he meets a marriage-minded magazine editor (Hirosue Ryoko) and wins her heart with his seriousness and sincerity. But before love can properly bloom, however, Kondo must overcome yet more challenges, starting with a certain imposter who is getting into more trouble by the minute.
This being an Uchida film, in which nothing is quite what is seems, anything you assume about where the story goes from here is likely to be wrong. Unless you can somehow get inside his brilliantly twisted mind – and become Uchida yourself.
Mark Schilling