Drifting aimlessly through a foreign country is a time honoured tradition for college students in many cultures. In North America, the obligatory and much clichéd trip to Europe generally involves booze, museums, hostels and trains. There is a part of nearly everyone that wants an experience beyond the standard where hazard is often the goal of the trip as it is a thing of which to be wary.
Frustrated with college life and feeling simultaneously 'sleepy and restless', Shin (the versatile Joe Odagiri) rockets off campus, literally screaming, for something away from orderly bookshelves and quiet study. The dream is the crime soaked streets of New York City, prompted by a statistic that it is Americas most dangerous city (the film is set in the late 1990s). He pushes off a couple of perky Japanese tourists upon arriving at the Big Apple despite their blatant advances. Shin does not want to be a tourist. He wants the experience of the mean streets.
After being mugged and left hungry and lost, Shin drops into the lap of two Japanese-Americans. Lee, played to the hilt by Japanese-Canadian Jai West, is a blustery and unpredictable ball of energy who somehow manages to rob convenience stores, deal drugs, handle the local (racist) thug cop effortlessly while speaking in his own personal patois of Japanese and Gangsta. Takeda is the shy sidekick in love with a white Maître d' up the street. Wanting to skip relationship and head straight into marriage and babies, his perfect English evaporates whenever he tries to speak to her. The boyish pair like their Carpe Diem mixed with petty larceny, speed laced ice cream and no shortage of firearms. They give Shin his dream of being apart of a full live-in-the-moment-consequences-be-damned existence all the while teaching him English using Walt Whitman verse.
Japanese director Sion Sono's grunge fantasy of New York is built up from impressions of the city through early Scorsese pictures makes no bones of its wish-fulfillment intent. It is awash in the red and yellow neon glow of the night and the soggy, trash strewn urban ghetto of the day. It is shot in with long hand-held takes and an improvised feel of perpetual motion. The vérité style -- using seat of the pants location shooting, non-actors in the supporting roles -- is cleverly subverted to full blown fantasy. The consequences of throwing beer into the face of the law and getting into casual gun-fights with shop proprietors? They feed back into the loop of cool that Sono is intent on running for the audience. Lee's trip to prison amounts to the observation that he looks good in orange. Late Taxi Driver ambitions offer little in the way of substance. But here, that is kind of the point -- the films strength and originality if you will.
Think Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy without the irony and polemic or Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket without the goofy humour. Hazard is determined to be lost in the romance of the foreign crazy-sexy-cool and free of any real depth or truth. So, it sort of ends up being the tourist voyage after all. The infectious performances and the dreamy version of New York captured by Sono still make it worth the trip along with the resolute aim of the film to have fun. The sticky question proposed at the end of the film is whether or not perceived experience by way of fantasy is a healthy way to make one a better person. As this popped into my head a while later proves somewhat that the film managed to burrow despite its best intentions.
[Hazard was shot over 5 years ago mainly in New York City with no budget or shooting permits and not released in Japan until last year]
Trailer (Embedded Flash)
Gomorrahizer's Hazard Page
Strange Circus is still on my list of to-see films. I managed to catch Sono's "Hair Extensions (Exte" which was a real blast just to see how someone like Sono would do a full on parody of a genre (J-Horror long-hair ghost stories), but still make it creepy as all hell and slightly disturbing to boot. Not a classic film by any means, but miles ahead of almost all western parodies I've seen to date...throwing stones at the genre, but playing in the same sandbox.
(As Todd mentioned earlier in one of his reports, having that night capped off by Sono singing the theme from "Linda Linda Linda" was a surreal treat.
I'm sorry I just answered my own question...there is a DVD.
The DVD doesn't have subtitles though. Was the movie mostly in Japanese? Or was there a lot of English as well??
Oh wow. I wasn't even aware of Hair Extensions. And Sono singing Linda Linda might have even been cooler than Linda Linda Linda itself.
Strange is...strange, perverse, disturbing. But absolutely captivating. Check it out if you're feeling daring
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