Ask
just about any cineaste to name his or her favorite
Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and it's usually
a toss-up between Robert Siodmak's The Killers,
starring Burt Lancaster (and based on an Ernest
Hemingway story) or The Postman Always Rings
Twice, with John Garfield (adapted from
a James M Cain story).
As
for Cannes, film noir has been one of the festival's
mainstays. Remember the 1998 festival with György
Féher's Passion (Hungary),
a freestyle adaptation of The Postman Always
Rings Twice programmed into Un Certain
Regard? Or Darezhan Omirbaev's Killer
(Kazakhstan), a psycho-thriller modelled after
The Killers?
This
year, two films in the Directors' Fortnight similarly
complement each other. One is Dito Tsintsadze's
Lost Killers (Germany), set in
the industrial town of Mannheim, and the other
is Masahiro Kobayashi's Koroshi
(Japan), located in the north of Japan. Appropriately,
"Koroshi" translates simply as "film
noir".
Born
in 1964 in Tokyo, Kobayashi first tried his luck
as a singer and composer, and then shifted to
screenwriting and directing. Among his
scripts
filmed by other directors is Yellow Donkey
That Has No Name, which was awarded the
Kido Prize in 1982. His two feature films, Closing
Time (1996) and Bootleg Film (1998),
could be seen at several international film festivals.
As
for his third feature, Koroshi,
it tells the story of Yuhi Hamazaki (Ryo Ishibashi),
a gentle and honest man "a typical Japanese
salaried man," says Kobayashi who gets
laid off from his job during
the recent Japanese recession. Like many of
his kind, he hangs around town with a heavy
heart and purposely avoids painful explanations
to his wife and daughter. One
day a stranger offers Yuhi
a deal: he must kill someone in return for a
job. He accepts, but the consequences are tragic...
Ron
Holloway
