TERUYUKI KAGAWA AND MASATO SAKAI IN KEY OF LIFE

Role reversal, for a while

Festival blurb notwithstanding (it hasn't even got the names right), the 35-year-old suicidal failed actor Takeshi Sakurai (Masato Sakai), doesn't "send" the meticulous older Yakuza hit man "Mr. Fixit" Shinichiro Yamazaki (Teruyuki Kagawa, a Kiyoshi Kurosawa regular), who uses the alias Kondo, to the hospital. Kondo just trips on a bar of soap when they're at the same bath house. Sakurai does switch identities with the gangster and holds onto his posh new identity when he finds he has amnesia. But this is no screwball comedy. It's absurdist, slow, and overlong by 20 or 30 minutes. It's complicated by the necessary female (we can't even say romantic) interest, the fussy, schoolmarmish VIP magazine head Kanae Mizushima (Ryoko Hirosue), who is looking for a husband, and improbably thinks the amnesiac gangster, wandering around thinking he's an actor, could be the one. It all gets worked out, but it takes two hours. The literal translation of the Japanese title, as explained in his review by Asian film expert Derek Elley on his site Film Business Asia, is A Key Thief's Method, a play on the fact that when push comes to shove -- with the usual turnabout humor -- it's the precise, accomplished Yamazaki (the meatier part played by skilled character actor Kagawa) who turns out to know more about acting than superfical "Method" actor ne'er-do-well Sakurai.

The Japanese-born Kenji Uchida studied film at San Francisco State University before returning to Japan to make movies and this is his third, by reports a partial return to form since the 2008 After School is reportedly not up to 2005's debut A Stranger of Mine, which won awards at Cannes including the SACD Screenwriting Award and the Young Critics Award. Elley, who knows Uchida's work, speaks of his screenplays as "elaborate chessboards" that require the right casting to bring them to life. That happens here -- sort of; but whether for the purposes of thriller action or for laughs, and the latter after the first few scenes (with the slapstick climax of slipping on a bar of soap in a bath house full of scrawny men), begin to fade anyway, pacing here seems lacking in energy. The premise-setting is lively, promising, and amusing. enough. But when Uchida gets into the working out of the outcomes of the identity switch, though it's fun to see Sakurai try to play tough guy and Yamazaki, floored by his amnesia, struggle with the role of penniless failed actor, action and tone begin to take second place to play with character. It's only when the real and the fake Kondo meet up and start collaborating that things warm up and one can smile again.

Both Yamazaki and Mizushima contain in their characters much ironic commentary on Japanese culture's control-freak tendencies; everyone, even the sloppy Sakurai, has a pad peppered with notes and plans of action, and early on Mizushima prissily cleans off her desk surface with a hand vacuum cleaner after finishing work. The joke is that even a Yakuza hit man can be super-tidy and have an immaculate pad; everyone likes the lovable failure, the actor with the tiny sloppy flatlet, but what can the Japanese make of a guy who can't even hang himself? That's funny. Not, in my opinion, funny enough, but who knows what's lost in translation? I could call this "slyly absurdist" and a "brilliantly understated gem" like Todd Brown of Twitch. It is absurdist and its understatement could be seen as sly. There just was that troubling matter of pace after the first quarter hour and until the last twenty minutes.

"Kagi-dorobô no mesoddo" or Key of Life, which weighs in at a hefty 128 mins., scored for its chessboard intricacy by winning Best Screenplay at the Shanghai Film Festival. A good festival run includes Toronto, London Cleveland, Hawaii, and Taipei. It opened in Japan 22 September 2012. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (27, 28 April, 5 May 2013 showings). Film Movement has acquired Key of Life for US distribution.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.