Kourakuzaru

A Japanese middle class family is about to make a journey on a hot summer's afternoon. But their annual holiday is haunted by mishaps. A huge and very disturbing traffic light hangs outside the motel where the family is staying, and the father of the family almost drives off the road before he finds the meaning of life in an hardboiled egg! The family sticks together, despite the fact that they are unable to communicate with each other.

COMMENTARY
The peculiar stories of Kenchi Iwamoto makes him one of the most extraordinary talents and interpreters of life in Japan today. Gone are the mammoth costume dramas of yesterday. Instead Iwamoto's extremely minimalistic films find their startingpoint in contemporary life. Together with like-minded compatriots such as Shinji Tsukamoto (Tetsuo I-I/) and Kaizo Hayashi (Circus Boys) he is at the center of what you may flippantly call the new Japanese wave. Their unique work gives the Japanese film a badly needed visual boost.
With Monkeys in Paradise Iwamoto continues to convey his highly personal and original view of contemporary Japan. As with his first film, Kilwchi, the viewers are offered a unique and exotic glimpse into a society where people have completely lost their ability to communicate. For a few days we accompany a typical Japanese middle class family through their emotional vacuum. The miniature community leads an ordinary, planned life. The monotonous and quietly banal existence is given new dimensions thanks to the special treatment Iwamoto
has given the images and the soundtrack. The locations in the film are distorted and enlarged out of proportion. The colors are artificial. The film is tinted in monotonous colors reminiscent of the coloring techniques used during the silent film era. Superimposed on these quiet images of bored and aimless Japanese, hovers a carpet of trivial everyday noise, like distant voices and running water. In Iwamoto's cinematic world they suddenly appear like a rowdy crowd and the raging sea.
In a similar wayan unpretentious family meal is turned into an orgy of close-ups and frenzied sound effects. At the beginning of the film when the son of the family walks along a deserted road, unusually devoid of Tokyo's swarming crowds, his daily walk home from school turns into a journey through a no man's land, a nightmare zone filled with strange voices and other sounds.
The apt and ironic title in English is Monkeys in Paradise. The cineast will recognize the obvious connection to Jim Jarmusch's equally minimalistic cult classic Stranger Than Paradise from 1989. And quite right too, as Iwamoto's family members are as incapable of meaningful relations as their American cousins. Inexorably locked in their positions after years of melancholy, prejudice and hopelessness, the family searches in vain for true feelings and warmth.
Don't be put off by the possible gloom
of the film, because first and foremost Monkeys in Paradise is an enourmously entertaining movie which by its visual range in combination with a chaotic soundtracl brings to life an absurd existence. ':'
Thomas Rynell

Medverkande
Yuji Kohtari, Kurenai Kanda: Producent
Schuichi Ohi: Manus
Kenchi Iwamoto: Foto
Hideyo Fukuda: Musik
Masako-San: Talat språk
Japanese