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Film Reviews

Monster & Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Published May 10, 2024
Monsters with dirty faces

Some directors are known for their car chases, Hirokaru Kore’eda is celebrated for his portrayals of families – big, small, sometimes barely recognisable as such. In Monster, the family consists of only a single mother, Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), and her 11-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), living in a provincial Japanese city. As they sit together, talking to a photograph of Minato’s dead father, we can see how closely they are bonded. They watch from their apartment window as a downtown building that contains a nightclub, goes up in flames.

“If a pig’s brain is put into a human head,” Minato asks his mother, “is that person a human or an animal?” It sounds silly, but this ‘pig brain’ proposition will recur throughout the film, attributed to several different characters.

The mother-son relationship develops cracks when Minato starts acting strangely, snipping away at his own hair, coming home from school with only one shoe. One evening he doesn’t come home at all, being eventually located in an old train tunnel hidden in the nearby woods. When he sustains an injury to his ear, Saori heads to his school to see what’s going on. Minato has laid the blame on his teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), who has also allegedly accused the boy of having a pig’s brain.

When Saori confronts the teachers, especially the principal, Mrs. Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), they become a caricature of Japanese shame and conformity, bowing deeply, apologising and promising to do better. Saori is rightly incensed by this behaviour, which does nothing to solve the mystery of her son’s strange behaviour or confirm that the awkward Mr. Hori did the things he was accused of doing. The principal, who has recently lost her grandson in a terrible accident, seems almost catatonic. The teachers apologise reflexively, with no explanations. We feel as bewildered as Saori, especially when it seems Mr. Hori is continuing to teach as usual, with no action being taken.

Kore’eda resolves the mystery by degrees, jumping back and forth in time to show us the origins of the things we can’t explain. These jumps are handled so seamlessly it takes a few seconds each time for us to realise where we are. In this film, nothing is quite what it seems. The crucial figure may not be Mr. Hori, but Minato’s classmate, Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), a small boy who is disliked by most of the class because of his eccentric behaviour. It’s Yori who claims constantly that he has a pig’s brain, and who leads Minato to the tunnel in the woods, where he has a hideout in an old train carriage. Yori is unhappy at home, being raised by a beer-swilling father who is usually at work or in a bar.

It begins to seem as if angelic-looking Yori is a classic bad seed, and for Minato, a bad influence. Yori keeps confessing that he’s a monster. As he carries a stove lighting device with him and roams around at night, it seems likely he had a hand in the fire that burned the hostess club his father frequented. Look closely and one can see the club was called Gilles de Rais, named after an infamous French child murderer of the Middle Ages.

While we are trying to understand the relationship between Minato and Yori, Mr. Hori is being persecuted by reporters and slowly driven mad. As we flash back and forth between past and present, Hori’s true role in the story begins to emerge.

Kore’eda keeps us wondering about who, if anyone, is the monster. With each part of the puzzle falling into place, the picture keeps changing. It’s not even clear what being a “monster” might mean.

One noteworthy aspect of the film is the music, which was the final score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023), best known for his haunting themes in Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). It’s a typically subtle score, hardly more than a few touches of the piano where a scene requires a little emphasis.

Monster won the Queer Palm, at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is a somewhat dubious honour in that it narrows the way we read the relationship between two 11-year-old boys. Minato and Yori are only on the cusp of puberty and whatever the nature of their friendship, it would be ridiculous to label it “queer”, in the way that word is now used to denote self-conscious gender non-conformity. Surely, it’s not unusual for children of that age to become passionately attached to their friends, often at the expense of their families. Are they considered “monsters” because of the closeness of a relationship that even makes Minato feel uncomfortable?

Kore’eda makes no moral pronouncements, showing huge sympathy for all his characters, from the boys to Saori, Hori and the Principal. Everyone has a hard time in this story, but they are given ample opportunity to declare their innocence to the audience, and the ending is not at all what one might expect. Perhaps the monster is no more than a red herring.

 

 

Two wise monkeys & friend

If Monster is one of those critically acclaimed films that can expect to enjoy a modest success at the box office, the new Planet of the Apes movie is set to be a blockbuster. The tenth in a series that has been running since 1968, and the fourth since a reboot in 2011, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a surprisingly restrained addition to the franchise. Indeed, the apes have grown so civilised and reflective that one expects them to break out the yoga mat at any moment.

The early part of the story spends so much time introducing us to the lead chimp, Noa (Owen Teague), and the rest of his clan, that I half expected David Attenborough to appear from behind a tree and start explaining the nature of their community.

Alas, before the great naturalist could make an appearance, everything had gone haywire, with Noa’s peaceful village of eagle fanciers being sacked by a band of rampaging apes led by a big gorilla (literally), named Sylva (Eka Darville), bearing a remarkable resemblance to Kyle Sandilands.

Having miraculously survived the carnage, Noa sets off on a quest to free his clan from the clutches of the marauders. This brings him into contact with a learned orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon), and a young woman who tags along, initially like a pet, until she reveals she can talk. For Noa this is roughly equivalent to us finding that our dog or cat can speak. By this stage humans have become so degraded they are considered non-verbal.

This woman, Mae (Freya Allen), turns out to be intelligent in many ways, although, like all humans, she’s more violent and less trustworthy than the chimps, who are textbook noble savages. Here we have a hint of that fantasy of all things Indigenous being pure and sacred, while contemporary western society is hopelessly debased. It’s a growing theme within the Apes series, which has often been interpreted as an allegory of race or class.

After an adventure or two in the forest, Noa finds himself one of a crowded colony of apes in a compound by the seashore, lorded over by a self-styled king named Proximus (Kevin Durand). Although he wears a funny little crown, Proximus is no laughing matter. He sees himself as latter-day Roman emperor, and the new Caesar – not Julius, but the great ape statesman and leader from the earlier movies, played successively by Roddy McDowall, then Andy Serkin.

Proximus’s greatest desire is to get into a locked fortress where the long-gone humans left a store of weapons and other goodies. Mae, however, has every intention of getting there first, with Noa’s assistance.

As tyrants go, Proximus does a nice line in looming menace and loud proclamations, but he is slack on basic security, letting his slaves roam around freely and hatch plots. Had he been a little more diligent our heroes would have had few opportunities to bring on the stunning denouement – but this is generally the case in most movies, in which the villains are always prone to lapses in common sense.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is purportedly the first in another trilogy of films that will show the evolution of ape society from its current hunter-gatherer phase and develop the character of Noa. As such, director, Wes Ball, anticipating a few years’ lucrative employment, has taken his time laying the foundations in that deliberate manner familiar from other Hollywood franchises. This makes Kingdom’ a slightly ponderous proposition that may satisfy fans who have dutifully followed the previous films but will do little for those seeking mind-numbing entertainment on a Friday night.

Those areas where the films keep advancing are costume, make-up and special effects, which have rendered the ape impersonation almost perfect. This extends to skillful mimickry of the way various apes move. It’s only when we get up close that we catch a glimpse of the actor behind the elaborate façade. Yet this degree of perfection only tends to throw the leaden nature of the narrative into sharper relief. As the story dragged on and on, I began to feel nostalgic for those days when the movies would just put a guy in a gorilla suit and tell him to start beating his chest.

 

 

 

Monster

Directed by Hirokazu Kore’eda

Written by Yuji Sakamoto

Starring: Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiragi, Yuko Tanaka, Akihiro Kakuta, Mitsuki Tatahata, Shido Nakamura

Japan, M, 127 mins

 

 

 

 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Directed by Wes Ball

Written by Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver

Starring: Owen Teague, Freya Allen, Peter Macon, Kevin Durand, Eka Darville, Lydia Peckham, Sara Wiseman, Travis Jeffrey, William H. Macy, Neil Sandilands

USA, M, 145 mins

 

 

 

Published in the Australian Financial Review, 11 May, 2024