Shinji Somai Retrospective at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 20th June through 1st July

The Edinburgh International Film Festival will be presenting the very first complete retrospective of the films of director Shinji Somai to be shown outside his native Japan, including a number of films never before screened in the UK. A constant source of inspiration to Japanese filmmakers, Somai’s work is still largely unseen by Western audiences.

Shinji Somai (1948-2001) directed his first feature, The Terrible Couple, in 1980. Based on a popular boys’ manga of the time, the film deals with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, presaging a long thread of Somai works in which young people are called upon to test their capabilities while discovering the unreliable nature of adult society. In Somai’s hands, children and teenagers are always treated and presented sympathetically and seriously: in the tranquil yet tense Moving (1993), a young girl separated from her father and at odds with her mother is forced to consider taking her upbringing into her own hands; in Somai’s enormously successful second film, the quirkily humourous Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981), a yakuza organisation in decline chooses an unsuspecting high-school girl as their new boss.

An actor’s director from the start, Somai’s trademark was a use of long takes, usually involving constantly-moving and spectacularly sweeping shots, which he felt allowed his cast to achieve the proper mood for scenes which would have been ruined by excessively quick editing. Perhaps the most extraordinary use of this technique is to be found in his 1985 film Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion (one of three of his films released that year), in which Somai uses an apparently single fourteen-minute take to reveal a succession of significant events in one character’s childhood.

The best of Somai’s films often straddle genres, taking off in unpredictable directions toward stimulating destinations – Tokyo Heaven (1990), for instance, mixes comedy, fantasy and trenchant realism in the story of a pampered young model, killed in a traffic accident, who is allowed by a trombone-playing, subway-riding angel to start her life over again. Topping all his works, however, is one in particular which new EIFF Artistic Director Chris Fujiwara considers one of cinema’s as-yet-widely unknown masterpieces: Typhoon Club (1985), screening at EIFF on Saturday 23rd June.

Text by Marc David Jacobs
Edinburgh International Film Festival