Shutter

Of course, even before entering the cinema, I knew that going to see the latest horror movie J Shutter would involve putting up with fifty children aged 10-14 yelling fake screams of terror, making sarcastic comments on screen loud enough for everyone. at the movies to listen, text, and talk on the cell phone throughout the movie. This is just an extension of a friend’s school, mall, or basement. The idea that the cinema could be a place that houses art as important as any museum does not occur to children of this age. Obviously most adults don’t even think of it, and looking through a score of online reviews of this movie, I see that it doesn’t even occur to many people who get paid to write about movies for a living. . Too; if most movies are given a chance, they certainly pay off the effort. Shutter definitely does.

The film opens with the wedding reception of a young American fashion photographer, Ben (Joshua Jackson) and Jane (Rachel Taylor). The superficiality of Ben’s personality is immediately transmitted, the first time he speaks; He tells the wedding guests, “Thanks for coming, let’s have some cake.” Your character flaws are the lynchpin from which the entire picture hangs, so this is important. Immediately after the wedding and consummation, the couple go to Japan, where Ben has a concert, for a combination of work and honeymoon. While driving down an isolated country road at night, Jane hits a young woman, but afterwards no trace of her can be found, not even by police search teams. In due course, a strange streak of white light begins to appear in Ben’s photographs. His assistant suggests that this looks like a ‘spirit photograph’ in which the spirits of the dead appear in photos, usually seeking revenge. It so happens that the assistant’s ex-boyfriend runs a well-known Japanese magazine dedicated exclusively to this topic. When Ben and Jane visit him, he says that the spirits featured in these photos often do so out of ‘unrequited love’, which will eventually turn out to be the case here. The mysterious girl they collided with on the way is Megumi, a translator with whom Ben had an affair on a previous mission in Japan. He just wanted an affair, but she was looking for so much more, and when he left her, she started harassing him. Ben’s friends Bruno and Adam, American expats living in Japan, got involved. It all ended in a very tragic way, and the ghost did not return anywhere to take revenge.

Although this is supposedly a “horror” movie, it is a superficial classification. There really isn’t a single truly scary moment in the entire image. My personal take is that it is no longer possible for any movie, not just this one, to scare audiences in the way that, say, Psycho could when it came to a new kind of cinematic experience. So to satisfy our cinematic hunger, we have to look for other things.

I have always felt that the existing body of films from the past can provide us with a way to actively participate in a new film, and that is through obvious direct visual quotes or through a scene that at least awakens in us a memory of a previous film. , even if this is not the real intention of the director. An example in Shutter: the characters see images in photographs of things that were not physically present at the time and place of the photograph. This immediately evokes the scenes in The Omen where the exact same phenomenon occurred prophetically. And of course, the truth and / or falsehood of what a camera can capture has been a cinematic concern since Blow Up. And an image that Kubrick played with in The Shining, that of a woman who appears to be sexy and beautiful since the front, but which is actually revealed to be a decomposing corpse when viewed from behind, also appears here. And these are just three examples that I captured in a single viewing, in a movie theater with sixty children screaming around me throwing popcorn. And I don’t think it really matters much if the director (Masayuki Ochiai) has the specific intention of quoting or referring in this way, or not. If you do, that’s fine; if he doesn’t, he speaks of the power of images in their own right and for their own good. And it pushes the imagination of the viewer to make connections for himself. We hate dabbling in cliches, but as it was directed by Ochiai and photographed by Katsumi Yanagishima, the poetry of the images is impressive. The aerial views of New York and Tokyo are exceptional (and also of the natural beauty of Mount Fuji). The visual style is very fresh, very steely and distant, with a very ice blue hue. I mentioned Blow Up before, and I think the way the modernity of 1960s London was portrayed has a very definite influence on the way that a kind of limitless international modernity of today, personified by the sensational Maya Hazen in mode feminine and so close brilliant James Kyson Lee in the masculine example – it is done here. Ochiai, like Michael Mann, has the gift of being able to talk a lot about the exhibition without dialogue. For example, Jane’s jealous nature is communicated twice through facial expressions, reactions she makes to how Japanese women approach Ben, crystal clear without a single word being spoken.

This movie is really about things like, how much should you know about your spouse’s background? What is the nature of stalking? To take justice into his own hands? And finally it is about the mixing of cultures in a true kind of internationalism. Again, a lot of this is visual. The Tokyo skyline could easily be the skyline of an American city. All young Japanese professionals speak English and dress like Americans, just like Ben and his friends move with ease and fluency through the Japanese language and customs. It is not overtly political at all, but it definitely works in a way that indicates that we are all going to move more and more towards the Global Village mode as the 21st century progresses.

Shutter is quite capable of making movies. Don’t believe the hype (negative).