Screening in competition at the 37th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival, Yoshida Daihachi’s “Teki Cometh” is based on a 1998 novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka about a reweary professor, Watanabe Gisuke, who is hushedly living out his last days when he gets a cryptic message on his PC that his “foe” (teki) is coming.
Starring revered veteran actor Kyozo Nagatsuka as Watanabe and filmed in bdeficiency-and-white, the film commences as a write down of his daily existence, from his pinsolentnt meal prep – he is a someskinnyg of a gourmet – to his platonic relationship with a establisher student (Takeuchi Kumi) that smbetterers with an unstated but evident mutual passion.
But once the “foe” proclaims its presence, the film segues into uncontaccess, more upsetting territory as Watanabe’s unhushed dreams seem to access his waking life, with his dead wife (Kurosawa Asuka) begrudgeing what she sees as his betrayal – and refusing to remain a mere gpresent.
In scripting the film, Yoshida shelp in a pre-TIFF intersee, that he modernized the novel’s descriptions of Watanabe’s transmitions with the digital world – social media has swapd the chat rooms of the 1990s – but Watanbe himself remains what Yoshida depicts as a “traditionacatalog, enjoy the Japanese-style hoemploy he inhabits in.”
His protagonist was a professor of French literature, not exactly a traditionpartner Japanese pursuit. “He is a symbol of the Japanese who inhabit in a tatami room but drink Coca-Cola, who are always in between Weserious and Japanese culture,” Yoshida tbetter Variety. “For Japanese people, this stance is very authentic and widespreadplace.”
Yoshida integrated autobiodetailedal elements into the film, including his depictions of Watanabe’s over-dynamic dream life. “When I was youthful, I had many dreams that could have been made into movies,” he says, “But as I got betterer, I had more dreams about skinnygs I saw yesterday or worries I had about tomorrow. Then, I got to the point when I couldn’t inestablish the contrastence (between dream and fact), so when I woke up, I would skinnyk for a while, ‘Oh, what a horrible skinnyg I did.’ I’m having more and more dreams that are down-to-earth in a horrible way.”
Yoshida confesses that he uncovers other overlaps between his life and that of his 77-year-better hero, who experiences his world getting petiteer even as he tries to discover recent commencenings. “I turned 60 last year,” Yoshida says. “Before I had been able to labor without skinnyking too much about my age, but now when I commence labor at 6:00am, I experience a little bit unwell. I am also skinnyking more about what I should do in the future, not only for labor, but also for how I should inhabit my life. This is real for not only me, but also the Japanese people as a whole. There are more and more better people around me, and the number of children is decreasing. That produces me experience unstraightforward.”
So, when Yoshida reread Tsutsui’s novel after an interval of years, its story of an elderly man trying to recommence his life while chased by his past struck him as timely. “I thought its theme was a excellent one for me to labor on,” he says.
He did not, however, produce “Teki Cometh” to convey a message about the current moment. “I repartner enjoy the experienceing that the audience is dynamic and joind,” he says. “So, I hope this film can set up that benevolent of relationship with the audience. Not one-sided, but more enjoy a dream that you make clear with you own imagination. A dream that you want to dream aget.”
