Both Somai Shinji and Suo Masayuki made commercial hits, Somai’s biggest box office success being the 1981 Sailor Suit and Machine Gun and Suo’s the 1996 Shall We Dance? They also earned their share of awards and accolades, domestic and international.
But both also started their careers when the Japanese film industry was in its 1980s slump and were overshadowed when the films of directors who came up in the Japanese New Wave of the 1990s like Kitano Takeshi, Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Miike Takashi were seen as edgier and fresher.
Somai, however, has since been lauded, first by Japanese critics and now by the world at large, for the stylistic boldness of his signature long takes and for elevating familiar genre situations to mythopoetic heights, far above the general run. The eleven-year-old heroine of Somai’s 1993 Moving doesn’t just run away from her divorcing mom and dad; she undergoes a spiritual transfiguration in the course of one eventful, awe-inspiring night.
Meanwhile, Suo’s comedies set in the odd corners of national life, from the downtrodden college sumo club of the 1992 Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t to the down-at-the-heels dance studio of Shall We Dance?, have
charm and heart in abundance, while getting laughs with smart offbeat gags and flawless comic timing.
In very different ways the work of these two directors exemplifies the theme of this year’s retrospective, which aims to bring excellent Asian films of the 1980s and 1990s to the Udine FEFF audience. Some are like certain B sides of old 45 rpm records, which were once disregarded, but are now justly celebrated as classics. And some are like the hit A sides that everyone knows, in pristine restored versions.
If we had been programming the festival in 1984 or 1994 instead of 2024, they would have all been in the line-up. What would Udine FEFF have been like before Udine FEFF existed? See the films of Somai and Suo to find out.