告白 (kokuhaku): Confession

I watched a decidedly dark and disturbing movie this weekend, 告白 (kokuhaku): Confession, the story of a teacher's revenge against two of her 13-year-old students responsible for the death of her child but not prosecutable under Japanese law. I've been meaning to see the film, winner of the 2010 Japan Academy Award　for Best Picture and starring one of my favorite actresses, Matsu Takako, for a long time. Finally I sat down and watched it and my overall verdict is: Great, dark film! That said, the story suffers from one glaring weakness: The main criminal's motive for carrying out the first and (mild spoiler alert) subsequent murders is his "mother complex."

Watanabe-kun's primary drive for using his scientific knowledge to develop weapons and perpetrate murder is his intense desire to shock his brilliant but absent mother, who abused and then abandoned him at a young age in order to pursue her academic career. This feature of the story bugged me for two reasons: (1) Won't Japan just leave its mothers alone for once? Where was the father? Is he at all responsible? (2) From what I've encountered in American news about the subject, most school shootings/bombings are carried out by kids from normal homes, for complicated reasons. A well-reviewed book on the Columbine disaster, for example, delves into the family lives of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and, from what I understand, shows that the parents were neither abusive nor horrendously negligent. By shoving blame onto the abstract concept of "absent mother", the movie misses the opportunity to more than scratch the surface of evil. For that reason, I feel 青の炎 (the link points to a review I wrote) does a much more brilliant job presenting the extremely complicated psychology of a killer. *DISCLAIMER: I actually read 青の炎, while I only watched 告白.

That said, the movie was great for a few reasons. First, Matsuo Takako is brilliant as Moriguchi Sensei. The revenge she carries out is also surprising and well-planned; the final scenes remind me of Yogisha X in the way details brilliantly fold together. Also, the cinematography--images of explosions happening backwards in time, a clock the boy has fixed to run backwards--illustrate the "if only..." theme in an interesting, eye-catching way, intensified by the haunting soundtrack, which features everything from Boris to Bach to the reviled (but appropriate for a movie about teenagers, you have to admit) AKB48. I also loved how the movie (and the book, too, from what I've heard, though I have not read it) are told through multiple perspectives.

In short, I really enjoyed the movie; I just wish the criminal's motives had been explored through the lens of a less tired trope than マザコン.