Fire Festival

Filipe Furtado4.5

Mitsuo Yanagimachi's amazing early run of movies, which Fire Festival is arguably the peak, is a stab at trying to find a register for Japan's post-economic miracle malaise and the violent reaction against it of those that resent it. Indeed, as a politics of ressentiment has become more central to the world at large, this has aged in some fascinating ways that go beyond its cultural specifics. Fire Festival has a great use of landscape and framing; its individual vs. community tension is greatly observed, and there is such a malevolence hanging over everything. The ending is quite something. Definitely a major influence on Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist, although given Yanagimachi's bluntness, he would probably rather go with "evil does totally exist." In the short list of greatest Japanese movies by a post-New Wave filmmaker.

Yavor Ivanov4.5

A slow doom chant coming from the land. It gives you pause and you gaze into the distance but soon shake it off. You are an earth tamer with iron bones, you can deadlift a mountain, you can blow away the sea, you can face, tear down and fuck anything the physical or the spiritual world can throw in your path. And you want more cause nothing's ever enough. Your appetite is thunderous. And you get more and more, but it doesn't keep you full. Instead, your bones become hollow. Rust never sleeps indeed, and rot is always near. Yet with you, it's always a deathmatch. So you face the land for one last time, but it is the land's bones that are hardened iron, yours are just hollow. And it crushes you. A rumble in the sky.The sun of the new day shows its face. But it is the same old earth, and the dogs of war are loose again.

Div_vs_film5.0

Kinya Kitaoji is something else in this. A uniquely nightmarish patriarchal figure who's crude, vulgar and cruel machismo causes him to attempt to subjugate both man and nature. He is from a town that appears divided into "sea people" and "mountain people" and he has very much taken the latter title as a point of pride. Training animals for cruelty, bullying and abusing his underlings and treating both his wife and mistress like shit. Whilst others revere the mountain god, he refers to them as his girlfriend as though he envisions nature to be no different to the various women he mistreats. A lot of this film is from the Imamura school of anthropological filmmaking so everything is approached with a frank quality with a complete disregard for social notions of the correct way to act. Sex is a commodity in many ways when it's not just crude and far from kept in private. A lot of time is spent just depicting normality in this town and Kitaoji's Tatsuo threads through it almost as the characterisation of everything that is fundamentally wrong with the people's and by implication reactionary capital's relation to each other and to nature.There is a very heavy ecological message here and it makes itself apparent in a particularly brutal manner that still cleverly threads through how we understand our central character. The extent to which a mountain god intervenes and makes our guy a puppet of their wrath is ambiguous because what the character eventually does is just an exaggeration of everything that was already hideous about him. It coming directly after the titular Fire Festival intended to drive evil spirits out adds another mythological dimension but then the festival itself is a massively violent and menacing exercise in machismo. It is a particularly haunting ending that drives forward the idea that whatever may be looking over all this nature is fundamentally disgusted with what people are doing to it. Best of all though it is a massive surprise that still feels like the logical culmination of everything we watched. As though this immense evil was lingering in our protagonist and everything that surrounded him the whole time. It feels like an ancient moral fable in a series of quite incredible disguises.To say this film is predictive is putting it lightly. These apocalyptic visions have become material. The social and economic collapse hinted at here is increasingly real. If anything what's being said here makes so much more sense now than it would have done in 1985.Freya's rating: 5/5As part of Recommend ya boi a film. (thanks Yavor Ivanov)Logged in Criminally few ratings.