STILL FROM THE BOX MAN

GAKURYÜ ISHII: THE BOX MAN (2024) JAPAN CUTS (July 10-21, 2024)

Shedding identity to live inside a cardboard box: Ishii attempts to film an avant-garde novel

Based on the novel of Kobo Abe. In black and white, with clamorous, then tinkly and delicate, score. Set in 1973, announced in English. The Box Man follows an unnamed man, and then a rival, who would give up his identity to live with a large cardboard box over his head, encountering a range of characters as he wanders the streets of Tokyo.

A description of the Abe novel is given in the original December 1974 New York Times review of it by Jerome Charyn. The book sounds potentially more interesting, thought-provoking, and evocative than the film. Perhaps this is inevitable because it's just that, as had been said, the novel's material is unfilmable, and Ishii has necessarily failed to film it adequately. But he might have stuck closer to the material.

You might consider in the Japanese context the relation between this idea of confining oneself to a cardboard box and the "Hikikomori," Japanese young people who go into extreme social withdrawal within their parental home, who may by now come to comprise a significant 2% of the total population.

From Eric Rowe on Letterboxd: "Life is a continual struggle, boxing oneself off from the world only leads to decay and eventual ruin. What starts out as what one could describe as punk rock nihilistic rumination on societal rot becomes a transcendental story of self and the nature of being. Deftly balances it's absurdist comedic sensibilities with what is ultimately a film with more profound philosophical intentions. I'm not sure anyone but Ishii could pull something off quite like this, his frenetic cinematic style of his early films infused with the transcendental qualities of his very best work. A metaphysical tale -- Be open to experience, consciousness itself is shaped by everything and everyone around you -- our souls are malleable."

The box man is an idea of someone who relinquishes his identity inside an anonymous covering. It's not a practical working-out of what it would actually be like to live inside a box. Sleeping in a box is another thing entirely. Jean-Michel Basquiat reportedly did that for a brief while when he first ran away to live in Manhattan and be an aritst. When it was daytime he was out and about in New York City. At night when he wanted to sleep he climbed inside (or under?) a big cardboard box. But living in a box, or wearing a box, are different ideas, and just ideas, which works well in a fantastic, speculative novel, but is harder to make into a film. It is a meditation on identity, on the escape from society, and also on writing, because the box man keeps a constant journal from his hidden vantage point inside the box. He is as much an observer as an outlaw.

Some will watch Gakuryü Ishii's film simply out of an interest in Japanese avant-garde filmmaking. Letterboxd contributor Shookone suggests the film is as if "kafka gets shown a random marvel film and then has 30 mins to write a Japanese version of it right out of his grave" and suggests Tarantino might approve. A festival blurb writer calls the film "an appropriately frenetic production chiseled with the punk ethos of Ishii’s early work," so a knowledge of that work might add to the pleasure of watching.

In the film Masatoshi Nagase stars as “Myself,” a photographer who becomes enraptured by the sight of a box man; however, he quickly falls into the self-fulfilled prophecy dictated by the doctrine of the box man: “Those who obsess over the box man become the box man," and so he starts trying out the role, hanging out inside a big card board box with an observation rectangle neatly cut at head height. For a while he is in his big studio playing around with a nude model, Yoko (Anana Shiramoto). This segment feels a bit like self-indulgent voyeuristic softcore porn, and not particularly "meta" or evocative of the "nouveau roman" with which the book is associated. But later there will be the duel of the two rival box men, one of whom calls the other a fraud (the fake doctor, Tadanobu Asano). At times it is absurd and funny and mostly it is thoughtful, and it provides a wealth of illustrive cinematic imagery for the labyrinths of identity and self-concealment. The Box Man eventually becomes, if you are patient with its meanderings, an interesting film.

The Box Man 箱男, 120 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 17, 2024, opening in Japan Aug. 23, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the Japan Cuts festival Jul. 10-21, 2024 in New York.

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