Trial and Error: Yoshitaro Nomura's "The Incident"

Being a huge fan of Japanese director's Yoshitaro Nomura's 1974 film "Castle of Sand", it's easy to see what attracted him to the subject matter of "The Incident", which was released four years later and racked up numerous Japanese film awards. Lengthy, dense and ultimately concerned with the shifting perspectives surrounding the murder of young Hatsuko (Keiko Matsuzaka), "The Incident" plays like a John Grisham novel transposed to Japan. By playing with the viewer's expectations.... giving us snippets of possibilities... parading a host of possible suspects, witnesses and innocent bystanders.... the film expertly navigates the murky waters of young love short-circuited by affairs, questions and insidious personalities. And, since its based on a novel by respected writer Kaneto Shindo, there's plenty of talk about the impact of environment on man. Long a subject of fascination for Japanese culture, "The Incident" makes it clear that the man accused of the murder, Hiroshi (Toshiyuki Nagashima), certainly seems to have little control over the spiraling judicial body firmly deciding his fate. It's no surprise he confesses to the murder in the opening ten minutes of the film. Things only get more complex from there.

Hands clutched to his side and eyes fervently poised downward, filmmaker Nomura constantly frames Hiroshi as some sort of fallen Greek god aimlessly watching the jury deciding his fate. There are onlookers as well- namely members of the press, his current impregnated fiance Yoshiko (Shinobu Ohtake, who's also the sister of the victim) numerous witnesses and elderly family members perched just behind him throughout the trial. Alternating between measured, careful dialogue of examination and cross-examination within the courtroom and the moments leading up to and including the murder, "The Incident" walks a precarious line of fact and blurred memory fiction. Just how reliable is the testimony of the witnesses? What exactly is the relationship of Hiroshi and Hatsuko? What do all those furtive glances between suspect and sister in the courtroom really mean? Over the course of two hours and twenty minutes, Nomura carefully builds a web of "Rashomon"-like events that fold and twist and bend around each other. Like he did in "Castle of Sand"- another film interested in the reverberations of the past on the present- Nomura mines an especially stringent intellectual thriller.

If the final verdict of the film is far less interesting than the serpentine-like path it took to get there, I feel that's the point. Compared to Nomura's other works (and its a shame more are not available on DVD, including this great film) "The Incident" fits neatly into his worldview of panoramic events whose real apocalypse can only be felt in the hearts of an unlucky few. A father and son in "Castle of Sand". A couple in "The Incident". A weathered, somewhat evil husband in "The Demon". While the whole world seems to be caught up in their own self-satisfying objectives in the death of beautiful Hatsuko, Nomura reminds us in a lyrical yet subtly dark closing shot that, perhaps, the greatest victim of this particular incident hasn't even been born yet.

The Yoshitaro Nomura Files: Stake Out

The title sequence of Yoshitaro Nomura's debut film, "Stake Out" (1958) lays its claim to the tradition of hard boiled cinema through its full screen display of one man's eyes, intently staring off into the distance, with the film's title scribbled across the image. It's an opening worthy of Sam Fuller or Robert Aldrich. But the rest of the film is specifically Japanese... and completely in line with Nomura's penchant for 'proceduralism' coupled with the devastating personal consequences that law and order often bring upon the individual.

But, in the hands of Nomura, that devastation is parceled out carefully and distinctly. After a lengthy opening sequence in which two men travel by train through an oppressive heat to an unknown town, we begin to piece together the reason for their journey. They find a house where a seemingly non descript woman is sending her children off to school. The two men discover the perfect vantage point of the woman's house across the street in a hotel and take up residence where they begin to watch her activities every minute of the day. Through a parallel narrative, we find out the two men are detectives, sent to the town in hopes that a wanted fugitive will reacquaint himself with the woman who was his lover years earlier. The first two-thirds of "Stake Out" is just that.... the two cops watching, observing, note taking and following the woman as she goes about her daily routines and walking to the market. But there are subtle moments that raise the tension level profoundly. Nomura frames the first half of "Stake Out" from the men's high vantage point across the street. Mailmen and stumbling drunks become chess pieces in a mounting puzzle of suspicion. When will the fugitive show up? Is this seemingly normal woman a red herring? Like Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", the frame of spying becomes an intense visual metaphor for our own viewership and expectations on the genre. And then something does happen and "Stake Out" spirals into another direction... one that had me rooting not for the cops but for the woman caught up in the middle.

Like Nomura's later masterpiece, "The Castle of Sand" (1974), "Stake Out" uses the police procedural genre to touch on larger themes in life. In that film, the body of an unknown man uncovers a disastrous history of one family. In "Stake Out", the damnation is more intimate to one person. Without giving too much away, Nomura certainly emphasizes this drama in the way his camera collapses down as the woman does the same in the penultimate scene. After a series of images caught up in the perspective of watching and being watched, its an acutely personal moment that realizes there are personal consequences to all this.

The Yoshitaro Nomura Files: The Castle of Sand

Yoshitaro Nomura's 1974 police procedural "The Castle of Sand" is an intensely microscopic view about the search for a killer where dead ends become routine and several narrative strands are shown in unison. Like the best procedurals, including "Zodiac", "Memories of Murder" and "The Day of the Jackal", "The Castle of Sand" examines the doggedness of several people to bring justice against a heinous act. And by mentioning those three illustrious films, I hold that Nomura'a film belongs alongside them.

After a 60 year old man's body is found bludgeoned to death in a rail yard, Tokyo detectives Imanishi (Tetsuro Tanba) and Yoshimura (Kensaku Morita) are assigned to the case. Having little to go on besides a brief conversation overheard in a bar that may have featured a certain word spoken in a certain Japanese dialect, the detectives embark on a frustrated investigation that yields little advancement. Over time, the younger detective Yoshimura is re-assigned, but elder policeman Imanishi continues with the case, eventually uncovering a sordid family drama that would feel right at home in a Shakespearean play.

Nomura, whose films are barely available here even though he directed over 35 of them, released "The Castle of Sand" in 1974, several years before his biggest hit "The Demon" in 1978. Given a bare bones DVD release that features some shoddy subtitling, "The Castle of Sand" is one of those films whose visible greatness lies in its unassuming narrative. At two and half hours, "The Castle of Sand" could be called epic, especially in the way it's final third plays out. With the killer identified, the police detectives plead their case for a warrant, spelling out the mystery we've been trying to uncoil for over 90 minutes. With blaring orchestra music overplaying the images, Nomura visualizes the development of a killer in a protracted, numbing sequence that swerves into melodrama and back with ease. It's a stunning third act that not only redefines the root cause of evil, but questions what exactly evil is. "The Castle of Sand" raise these intriguing questions, but it also succinctly proves that there's no fury scorned like that of a frustrated detective.