Ritual Sacrifice
Sean Price Williams and Takeshi Fukunaga/Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Ainu Mosir (2020)
“Ainu Mosir” tells the coming-of-age tale of an indigenous Japanese teenager shouldering the weight of preserving a way of life. Kanto (Kanto Shimokura) lives with his widowed mother (Emi Shimokura) in a tourist-trappy northern Japan tribal reserve, where residents run souvenir shops and delight visitors with ritual ceremonies performed with clockwork precision. No spoilers, but Kanto has a very personal stake in a controversial village tradition. His coming-of-age isn’t the typical rite of passage for indigenous youngsters. Instead of his survival skills being put to the test, Kanto is confronted with an adult decision pitting his personal values against communal responsibilities.
Like the works of so many filmmakers in the diaspora, “Ainu Mosir” seems to be a foreign film made with a Western audience in mind. U.S.-based writer-director Takeshi Fukunaga appears to be emulating the aesthetic façade of a Japanese film, achieving with cinematographer Sean Price Williams a textural look and feel recalling Hirokazu Koreeda, as if to meet Western viewers’ expectations of what an authentic Japanese movie should look like.
The film’s thematic concern, indigenous culture in Japan, also feels like something that would resonate more in the woke international arthouse circuit than in Japan’s domestic market. Most filmmakers working in the diaspora tend to disparage their native cultures and signal oppressions, artistic and otherwise, in a transparent bid for Western validation by pandering to viewers’ latent racism and imperialist superiority complex. Thankfully, Mr. Fukunaga resists all that as well as the temptation to crowd please.
The ending of “Ainu Mosir” isn’t at all what we might expect. It’s rooted in cruel reality to be sure, but there’s also something mythical and fablelike about it. The film ultimately feels like a very modern telling of a classic bedtime story.
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