Through the Fog: Kyoshi Kurosawa on “Cloud” on Notebook

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).

After four decades of scaring moviegoers with all manner of supernatural subjects, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has now done just that Cloud (2024), aimed at exploring the psychological effects of a more mundane evil: capitalism. In this sequel to his medium-length psychodrama Call Earlier this year (a film as cryptic and tantalizingly elusive as anything he’s attempted in recent memory), Kurosawa reconfigures some of the themes and ideas that have animated his long-running career in the horror genre, namely loneliness and the ways in which the internet can stir things up. evil forces from within and without. Kurosawa has described Cloud as an ‘action film’, a simultaneously appropriate and inadequate characterization for a film that operates on a slippery dialectical wavelength. It’s this cerebral approach to the genre, rooted in the mundane rather than otherworldly, that has led critics like Chris Fujiwara to avoid placing Kurosawa alongside the film. his contemporaries in the J-horror movement, but in the vein of Hollywood studio practitioners like Jacques Tourneur – a comparison neatly reinforced by Cloud‘s economic mix of social drama and technophobic intrigue.

Cloud Masaki Suda plays Yoshii, an internet reseller who buys consumer goods at a discount and sells them online for a profit. Sometimes the items are legit, other times not so much, and it’s lucrative enough for Yoshii to one day quit his day job at a garment factory, turning down a promotion from his noticeably perplexed boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa). In the words of a local supplier, Yoshii “operates on impulse and instinct.” It’s a cold and callous approach that is clearly paying off, but at what cost? Yoshii has so much faith in this self-sustaining racket that he even turns down an offer from an old school friend (Masataka Kubota) to invest in a new auction platform, a seemingly incidental decision that, like everything else in this quietly unfolding film, begins to to last. new weight when Yoshii moves with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa) to the countryside, where he can store more goods and withdraw from those who place unnecessary pressure on his personal and professional pursuits.

It’s here where incidents that Yoshii could once dismiss as negligible or coincidental while living in the city – such as a disturbing encounter in a park or a strange occurrence on a bus – become increasingly threatening. Shortly after settling in, a piece of a car engine crashes through Yoshii’s bedroom window, followed by the arrival of ominous figures around the property. Meanwhile, with the help of a new assistant (Daiken Okudaira), Yoshii continues to expand his business to the point where he attracts the attention of the local authorities, who believe this mysterious outsider is dealing in counterfeit goods. It turns out that these events are not unrelated, but are the result of a group of Yoshii’s clients, as well as his former boss and classmate, coming together to take revenge on the man they believe defrauded or belittled them – a revelation that most directors would take advantage of. as a means to clarify the film’s moral position and be done with it. Instead, in a bold twist, Cloud shifts from Yoshii’s perspective to that of his victims, who have connected through chat rooms to devise an elaborate kidnapping plan that then plays out in great detail over the course of the second half of the film.

In a statement from the director at the film’s premiere in Venice, Kurosawa compares this online mafia mentality to the mentality that leads to war. Although I have never considered Kurosawa an explicitly political filmmaker, the whimsicality of Cloud is a perfect example of cinema’s ability to reflect the current cultural climate, something that could also be said about the Y2K paranoia of the director’s millennium classic, Pulse (2001), as well as the contemporary sociological malaise described in Charisma (1999) and Tokyo Sonata (2008), the most notable precursors to this film. In both, notions of class and individuality are tested in group settings and through culturally specific social hierarchies. Here we witness that dynamic in microcosm: the crowd that descends on Yoshii is diverse to the point of instability. The characters not only come from different backgrounds, but also have slightly different grievances with Yoshii, resulting in disagreements over how and in what manner he should be punished, among other things. Ultimately, they are united solely by an unchecked bloodlust, which, in typical Kurosawa fashion, is dramatized to the point of abstraction. How exactly Yoshii comes to grips with these events and to what extent this world is able to maintain itself despite such rampant immorality ultimately remains out of the picture. As is often the case in Kurosawa’s work, the closer you look, the further things escape comprehension.

When I was in Venice, I sat down with Kurosawa to talk Cloudthe origins of the film and how its political, thematic and structural particularities naturally and unexpectedly revealed themselves during the filmmaking process.

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).

NOTEBOOK: Before we talk about the themes or plot of the film, I thought we could discuss the idea of ​​making what you describe as an action film. What made you explore the genre now?

KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: I’ve always had a desire to make action films, but not normal action films, even though I like a lot of normal action films. It’s very easy to make an action movie from a yakuza, police, army or mafia story, but what I wanted to focus on here were the ordinary people, who don’t normally live with violence in their everyday lives. It was a challenge: how can I bring these ordinary people into a world of action and violence, and put them in some kind of extreme situation where they could be threatened or killed?

NOTEBOOK: Your films were often about technology and sometimes about the Internet, as in Pulse. I’m curious what draws you to technological themes and whether you see this film as a continuation of the ideas you started exploring in the late 1990s and early 2000s?

KUROSAWA: I’ve never really considered technology as one of my main themes. I’m not very interested in whatever the new technology is at any point. For Cloud I was more interested in focusing on something that we have within us, for example an uncertainty that we can then increase or multiply through the possibilities of the internet. The internet has many possibilities, and one of them is its ability to amplify what is inside us.

NOTEBOOK: Was there a particular real-life situation or incident that inspired the story?

KUROSAWA: Yeah, I actually took the idea from an example a few years ago in Japan where four or five guys on the Internet teamed up to kill a guy they had a problem with but didn’t know in real life, similar to what you see in the movie.

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).

NOTEBOOK: In your director’s statement, you say that in the film, “the pursuit of profit and revenge overlap and reinforce each other, ultimately initiating acts of violence, and before you know it there is no turning back. In a sense, this could also be how modern wars arise.” I’m curious at what point did you start to think of this story as something that could be read politically, or at least from multiple angles?

KUROSAWA: War wasn’t actually a theme I thought I wanted to explore when I first started making this film. But as I started developing the story, I started to realize that it had aspects related to war. In the film, it is a series of very small frustrations felt by the characters that lead to their hatred and to outbursts of violence, gunfire and even murder. For me, this psychological aspect is most related to war, because wars usually involve different nations or cultures, but it is individual, unrelated people who have to shoot and kill. There is no personal connection between them. It is this kind of psychology that connects the two ideas.

NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the cultural dynamics in the film in relation to the division between city and country? It seems to determine both the shape of the story and the way the characters interact with each other.

KUROSAWA: There was no great intention on my part in deciding to set the film between the city and the countryside. It’s not a theme or a metaphor or anything like that. But I do have a friend who is a reseller, and he told me that because of all the merchandise that resellers tend to have, they need a lot of space to store the products. In Tokyo it is difficult to have enough space to store much of anything. That’s why I decided to have Yoshii move from the city to the countryside.

To my surprise though Cloud only revealed something really interesting about the character to me after the film was over, in a way that only cinema can. In Tokyo, Yoshii is actually alone. There is an emptiness in him. But maybe we couldn’t see his state of mind, or his loneliness or problems when he was in Tokyo. But in the countryside, with its very isolated spaces, his state of mind comes through strongly. This wasn’t intentional, but it was the result of this decision to move the character from the city to the countryside.

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).

NOTEBOOK: The film also seems to be divided between Yoshii’s sole perspective in the first half and the crowd’s more collective perspective in the second half. Was this something you came up with as you were writing, or was it developed as you were on set and able to work out scenes with the actors and your cinematographer?

KUROSAWA: What you just mentioned is interesting. I never thought about that aspect because I went from one perspective to many perspectives. For me, that was just part of making an action movie: not only did I need a protagonist, Yoshii, but I also needed enemies for Yoshii, and those usually arrive as the second half of the movie begins – although you do get hints from some of them before. Halfway through the film, there is a scene where a character named Miyake is introduced living in an internet cafe. And this moment comes suddenly. Miyake has never been seen before, but soon many characters around Miyake are introduced, and it starts with this scene. So you’re right that in both cases – city versus country, individual versus collective – these dynamics helped change and shape the structure of the film.

NOTEBOOK: The last scene seems to suggest or even set up an entirely new story. Is this a world you want to return to?

KUROSAWA: I admit that if I could make a sequel to this story, it could be very interesting. But no, this is a deliberate, open-ended conclusion. I leave it to the viewer’s imagination to imagine how or where the story could go. And this is not something unique Cloud. You could say that all my films have a similar open ending. Things are usually not clarified; there are no clean endings. I let the viewer imagine and interpret as he wants.