Kore’eda surprises us with a poignant story, which binds the eye and shatters all certainties. Monsterpresented during the last Cannes Film Festivalin which it won the award for Best Screenplay, theatrically distributed by Lucky Red e Bim Distributionis a precious story, a peripheral story, an orphaned family of a father and a husband who has to live with the absence and the silence buttoned up on their clothes.
It all begins with a burning building, a blaze against the night sky, which also becomes the emotional specter that hovers over the film. The single mom Saori (Sakura Ando) and her son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) watch as a fire rages through the building, which is also the site of a dodgy bar, where rumors circulate that Minato’s teacher, the Master Hori (Eita Nagayami), is one of the customers.
Monster, the review of Kore’eda’s film presented at Cannes
Apparently there isn’t a good relationship between the teacher and Minato, to the point that Minato often comes home shaken, revealing to his mother that the teacher is bullying and humiliating him in class. When Saori bursts into the principal’s (Yûko Tanaka) office demanding an explanation, the school tries to dismiss her with a bizarre excuse, complete with bows and an apology. The displeasure is so insincere that Saori only gets more furious. However, the story becomes more complicated when the teacher reveals that it is actually Minato who is bullying another child. But the truth is more complicated.
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Kore’eda winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival per A family affair in 2018, he collaborates with the screenwriter Yûji Sakamoto and the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who creates melodies that combine with images to stunning effect, a picture of life in all its beauty and pain.
Monster is a story that challenges us, that constantly shifts perspective, a family drama about bullying, homophobia, family dysfunction, all to create a sense of inadequacy that flows everywhere: being in the world as an act of inadequacy. The cinema at Kore’eda often reflects on family roles that develop outside a canonical and institutional affective frame, and this time too Kore’eda creates a careful story, full of hidden twists, and dresses the film in different genres, sometimes as a thriller and sometimes as a mystery.
Monster, our review of the Kore’eda film
The way Kore’eda positions the camera and builds suspense is done carefully, starting with Saori’s perspective, which is the most informationless, the most constrained, the most unaware perspective: whether we like it or not, the parents they tend to be the people who know the least about their children. The other two perspectives are delivered in the hands of the master Hori and Minato: we see the story rewind each time through their gaze, an element that makes the story a set of three different films, of three different genres, one after the other, that examine the same events from three different perspectives.
In the viewer’s head continuous questions stir, and often even contradicting each other, being Monster a changing and sometimes difficult to follow portrait of several people inhabiting the same microcosm, each of whom proves to be far more complex and unfathomable than we might suppose. Kore’eda is skilled in selecting and showing in an almost surgical, and even manipulative way, only selected pieces of the private life of each character, to the point that he immediately forces us to jump to the wrong conclusions, distracting the viewer with topics such as bullying, ‘aggression and suicide when the real linchpin is how children are socialized and the unfair pressures and expectations that are placed on anyone who doesn’t fit the norm.
Monster, the film review: the portrait of society through the eyes of a mother, a teacher and a child
Monster it is not a film about monsters, but the theme of the film is the monstrous, the monstrous understood as an unfulfilled affirmation, as loss, as mourning, as incomprehension, incommunicability: this story about childhood, love begins under the sign of disaster and it continually reminds us how vulnerable our world is. Everything is colored by anguish, tension and fear of further loss and slipping into oblivion, as if the film is constantly poised between this world and another.
Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa could be the point of reference for a story like this, even if the prospects of Monster they are never wrong or dishonest, just incomplete. We’re not really seeing different stories, but rather the same story from different perspectives, returning three times to the image of the burning building. Every time Kore’eda returns to the fire we know that we have returned to the beginning of the story.
By stitching the stories together precisely, cutting them, and showing us the dangers of fragmented perspectives, the director does nothing but demonstrate how compassion can turn into a cruel force when perceived in fragments, without context, without history, and as such it is not a state, it is not something natural: compassion is a process that requires discussion, an expansion of one’s field of vision.