Film
Naked of Defenses
Muboubi
Cert:(adv 12A)
Dir. Masahide Ichii
Japan , 88 mins, 2008
Cast: Ayako Moriya, Sanae Konno, Ryuki Nishimoto, Kuniaki Nakamura
The short film Clacson will be shown before this film.
Like our other BIFF ‘09 feature from Toyko’s PIA Film Festival (Mime-Mime), Naked of Defenses is the story of an unfulfilled young woman. In a sleepy semi-rural everytown in the Hokuriku region of central Japan, Ritsuko (Moriya) works on a factory production line. It’s a job so comically tedious that neither we nor the employees know just what they’re helping produce. At home Ritusko’s husband is uninterested in their marriage. Despite her best efforts to engage him, he can barely muster much kindness towards his wife. Yet Ritsuko desperately wants to talk and to make things work – for one thing she’s carrying an emotional burden alone.
Those that caught director Masahide Ichii’s slacker comedy Dog Days Dream at last year’s BIFF will recognise a signature style. Young Ichii is the editor of his own features, and as last March’s audience will testify, he knows just how to clinch a scene, either comic or tragic, with a deft cut to the punch line. He’s also a master of pacing, with Naked of Defenses cranking up the tempo from slow-burning torpor to a final crescendo. Though Naked…retains some of his earlier film’s wry laughs, what’s changed most is a greater emotional depth, confirming Ichii as a bright new talent.
One day, Ritsuko is introduced to a new colleague, whom she must supervise. Chinatsu is everything that Ritsuko is not – she’s relaxed and confident, and she’s heavily pregnant. In the relationship that develops between the two women, Naked of Defenses really shifts up a gear, detailing a moving friendship that reaches across awkward barriers. It’s this that prompted Maggie Lee of The Hollywood Reporter to mark Naked of Defenses out as “a poised yet internally turbulent film of almost religious purity and compassion”.
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
