Film
Mime-Mime
Maimu Maimu
Cert:(adv 12A)
Dir. Yukiko Sode
Japan , 87 mins, 2008
Cast: Ayako Niijima, Masahisa Yamazoe, Kanji Tsuda, Tomono Kuga
The short film Charlie's Story will be shown before this film.
Following last year’s selection of PIA award-winners at BIFF, this year we again feature a pair of witty, aloof, whimsical, angry and above all brilliantly edited movies from Japan (see Naked of Defenses for the other). For 30 years, Tokyo’s PIA Film Festival has been ushering talent from Japan’s ever vibrant, always skilled independent film scene onto an international stage. Here is local film culture at its most individual and fresh, made without calculating designs on any international market. PIA represents accomplished filmmaking with a local, personal outlook – and when the personal chimes with the universal, we have the cinema of discovery.
Mime-Mime is the story of eccentric Makoto (impressive, perfectly cast Niijima), a young woman who’s the black sheep of an averagely dysfunctional family. She lives alone in her apartment, and life is an endless series of dumb distractions, including a beyond-the-pale affair. Makoto’s unimpressed by most people, and a visit to her parents’ apartment (played out under Miyauchi Yuri’s delightfully childish score) is a reluctant chore. Chez parents, Makoto meets Nakajii, her straight-laced former elementary school friend. He tries to instil some purpose in Makoto’s life, but soon comes off the worse for his endeavours, and is reduced to guiding her pathetically through a disastrous camping trip.
Both Mime-Mime and Naked of Defenses are female-centred affairs that explore that feeling of ennui when life doesn’t quite live up to expectations. Director Sode, 26, recognised that she shared frustrations with ‘goal-oriented’ values with many other people, and set out to make a film about a young woman “full of doubt and lukewarm despair”. But if this makes her film sound like an over-earnest chore, fear not: Mime-Mime earns its satirical message with some delightfully droll comedy.
Tom Vincent
Other films showing that are Premieres & Previews are:
- Is Anybody There?
- Hour Glass
- Genova
- Everlasting Moments
- Il Divo
- Il Divo
- This Beautiful City
- The Shaft
- Vogelfrei
- The Agent
- The Investigator
- Genova
- The Agent
- The Investigator
- Good Cats
- Good Cats
- Adventurers
- The Tour
- Mime-Mime
- 3 Seasons
- March
- When Life Was Good
- March
- Religulous
- Down to the Dirt
- Heart of Fire
- Parking
- Ordinary Boys
- The Debt
- Sling Shot
- The Investigator
- Let the Right One In
- Who is KK Downey?
- Traitor
- Naked of Defenses
- Shifty
