Typhoon Club
Year: 1985
Director: Shinji
Somai
Rating: 7.5
A few years after his popular film Sailor
Suit and Machine Gun about a female high school student who inherits a Yakuza
gang from her father and famously picks up a machine gun and sprays it around,
director Sômai Shinji returns with another film about young students
but with a much more serious intent. The film won many awards and is highly
regarded in Japan appearing in the Kinema Jumpo’s 100 Greatest Japanese Films.
If I were to make such a list, I have my doubts that this would get on it
- I suspect that many of themes that run through the film are more understood
by the Japanese - that it speaks more distinctly to their culture than to
a universal one.
Most of it takes place in a Junior High
School outside of Tokyo where life seems stifled - still born - and it follows
a group of students both male and female who one assumes have known each
other all their lives. They are friends simply through the repetition of
knowing one another, but in a sense they don't really understand each other
at all. The bonds of friendship seem elastic and easily let go. Beneath
the surface all of them are bubbling up with issues that they are too young
to understand, yet they know something is wrong. It is a world in which
parents are absent - uncaring perhaps though it is hard to say. Not just
parents but authority just isn't there.
The one teacher we meet in the film is
a loss, unable to control the classroom when it breaks into a rumble and
unable to keep his mixed up personal life out of the classroom. When one
of the male students nearly drowns due to a prank the girls play on him,
no one considers calling for help. At another time a girl has acid poured
down her back and no punishment is meted out to the boy - it is quickly forgotten
and he is still accepted into the group. Later he attempts to rape the girl
in the school - chasing her up and down hallways before finally cornering
her in a classroom where he rips off the back of her blouse - sees the scar
caused by the acid and collapses. She tells no one but even more concerning
is that none of her friends ask her what happened - why is your blouse ripped.
We get brief fragments of their lives
and trying to paste it together to make sense of it is a challenge - trying
to find the distinct personalities is complicated as the camera rapidly
moves around their lives for a few moments before departing to another.
Which are the girls who are having a lesbian affair, which girl masturbated
in her mother's bed, which of the guys is it who seems to have a case of
OCD as he can't go into his house and keeps saying different versions of
I am home without being able to enter. It takes a while to piece it together.
Then the typhoon comes and they are stuck at school. Again the authorities
vanish and the parents seemingly make no effort to contact them or come get
them. Throughout there was a sense of malaise, of disquiet but the typhoon
seems to break down inhibitions as the rape attempt occurs and then they
all dance in their underwear in the rain. The final act is a shocking one
- totally unexpected and terribly nihilistic and incomprehensible.
Though all these acts that I mention -
rape, lesbian sex and masturbation might make one think this is an exploitation
film - it is far from it. It is all observed from a distance - Somai keeps
his camera very neutral - never gets intimate with the characters or the
acts - a disinterested witness. The camera movement in the film is lovely
- it always seems to be in the right spot and tracks some of the action effortlessly.
I am still thinking about this film - trying to soak it in - I am not sure
whether I liked watching this or not - it made me uncomfortable - probably
more so because they are so very young - but leaving me uncertain is probably
a good sign.
