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.
