Heaven's Story

Zeze Takahisa's 278-minute long saga "Heaven's Story" (2010), based on a story written by Yuki Sato, must be the longest HKIFF film I saw this year. It is a story of surrogate revenge in which a girl of about 8 years Sato (Kana Honda) had her mother and younger sister killed by a psychopath who then committed suicide. After seeing on television an interview of a man who had suffered a similar fate Tomoki (Tomoharu Hasegawa) who is seen and heard on the television screen vowing to kill the murderer, she is determined to continue living to see that justice is done. In the meantime, the second murderer is caught. He is a disgruntled and down and out vagrant  Mitsuo ( Shugo Oshinari) who never had any love from his parents and who did not know why he killled Tomoki's family in a fit of rage. Tomoki was angry not only because he lost his whole family in a day of senseless violence but later that never did Mitsuo once apologize to him.

In the meantime, we are shown what happened to the principal characters of the two different murders. Tomoki has since remarried a new wife, a partially deaf rock guitarist  Tae (Nahana) and had a new girl by her. The story starts with the grown up Sato (Moeki Tsuruoka) visiting the town in which Tomiki is living, borrowing a bike fom Haruki, the son of a policeman Kajima (Jun Murakami) who has a part time job as a hit man who regularly pays money to the daughter of another family whose chief breadwinner Kajima had accidentally killed in self defence. After 9 years, Mitsuo's lawyer Kyusaku Shimada applies to court for him to be put on parole because he has since become a different person and succeeded inter alia because one Kyoko (Hako Yamasaki), a Goh mask and doll maker suffering from Alzheimer's disease heard his lawyer Shimada reading out on television an open letter written by Mitsuo in which he said he would like to be remembered by the unborn and whose curisoity was thus tickeled as to the kind of person who would write such an unusual open letter. She begged his lawyer Shimada to allow her to visit Mitsuo in prison which he initially refused because he thought her just a nosy prankster but she was not. They met. Mitsuo is moved by her honesty and apparent genuineness and decides to accept being adopted by her so that he could look after her. 

There is also another sideline about Haruji always stealing things repeatedly from other people and being beaten up by an adult who was taking time off to hire the services of a hooker and being chased by other kids and finally jumping down from a railways bridge and ending up in hospital which shows us how concerned his father is with and deals with him and a further sideline about someone who could not bear to have an entire town abandoned and who treated the deserted mining town as his personal kingdom so that he would not hesitate to murder any one who dared instrude into his territory like one of the targets on Kajima's hit list with Kajima hot on his pursuit.    

The epic ends when Tomoki is finally tracked down by Sato after 9 years. She falls in love with him, reminds him of his pledge and vow to kill the killer with his own hands in front of the televsion 9 years ago. At first, Tomoki who was already psychologically prepared to to forget the whole painful episode but Sato forced him to confront his vow. He decided to act on fulfilling the promise he made to the world. Together they traced the whereabouts of Mitsuo when he brought Kyoko back to the broken down buildings of the now deserted former mining town for reminiscence. Kyoko was stunned by what it looked like now and how different it was from what it used to be and remembers those scenes of childhood during which she was playing. Perhaps because of the exhaustion of the journey and the mental strain of being brought back to her childhood and perhaps whilst Tomoki and Mitsuo were fighting. Sato suggested to her that she was merely using Mitsuo to look after her and that Mitsuo was doing the same to get out of jail. When he discovered that Kyoko had died, Mitsuo broke down in tears, causing Tomoki to relent in his revenge attack. Mitsuo  buried her but later Tomoki decided he must not fail to honour his promise to the entire world and in particular to Sato and must finish him off perhaps the sight of Mitsuo mourning her death triggering off the long buried memory of the death of his wife and child.  Mitsuo did apologize to Tomoki  shortly after they met but the force of the circumstances are such that they eventually still continued to fight each other. Whatever the true reason might be, he restarted the fight although Mitsuo tried to avoid him. They fought. Mitsuo, who did not want to fight was forced to kill Tomoki, Mitsuo himself having first been shot by Tomoki but having successfully struggled against him and took over his pistol, he finished Tomiko off. Perhaps Takahisa wants to show the absurdity of the killer of another family being forced again to kill the another person merely because the latter has been goaded to do so through a mixture of a misguided sense of duty responsibility to his own promise and his own otherwise forgotten past.

As the film ends, we see a new baby by Kana (Norki Eguichi), the daughter of the family whose breadwinner Kajima accidentally killed, being successfully born. The grim saga drew to a close. It is a story about senseless (?) violence, the pains of grief, the effect of time on memory, the need to keep one's promise including the promise of revenge and of the power of genuine admiration and love. By the story, is Takahisa trying to say cinematically that it makes no sense to take the promise of revenge so seriously after a number of years and that emotions and promises appopriate at one stage in one's life may no longer make any sense a long time afterwards and may indeed become itself  a source of the unnecessary prolongation of bad karma and the creation of new cause for future sorrow? 

Is the introduction of  the extremely formal Goh play, with its carefully measured and studied movement  which constantly portrays love a double hidden message by Zeze Takashima that what interest and moves people most is love and/or that each of us is also in a way, the player in our own form of Goh play, in which we express ourselves and present ourselves to the world through a beautified mask? 

Takahisa spent five to make this film which won two awards, the FIPRESCI and NETPAC awards, at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival 2011. However to me, the pace of the movie is unbearably slow. I am sure it could have been halved without any substantial loss. Almost everything appears to be filmed with  medium to long shots, perhaps to emphasize its documentary character but there were also some very studied wide angle shots as if from a postcard album with open skies, snow covered mountains. seagulls flying over the seas which gives the epic story a kind of grandeur as the drama of vicarious revenge unfolds. The music is minimal, the acting restrained although the pace of the movie could certainly be stepped up. I'd give it a 2B. 

The Cast from Wikipedia

Moeki Tsuruoka	Tomoharu Hasegawa	Shugo Oshinari	Jun Murakami	Hako Yamazaki
Sato	Tomoki	Mitsuo	Kaijima	Kyoko

Nahana	Kenichi Kurihara	Noriko Eguchi	Hako Oshima	Mitsuru Fukikoshi
Tae	Haruki	Kana	Naoko	Sato's father

Reiko Kataoka	Kyusaku Shimada	Shun Sugata	Ken Mitsuishi	Kanji Tsuda
Sato's mother	lawyer	Suzuki	Shioya	Kuroda

Toshie Negishi	Makiko Watanabe	Nao Nagasawa	Kana Honda	Koichi Sato	Akira Emoto
chiho	Mina	doctor	8 year-old Sato	Namita	Souichi