The last time I was uplifted by a slice-of-life musical feature out of Japan was Kenji Iwaisawa’s animated film, On-Gaku: Our Sound, which centered on a trio of high school delinquents who decided out of nowhere to start a band. Despite knowing next to nothing about their instruments or music in general, the end result was something quite mesmerizing – something that makes me appreciate all the other music-centric dramas covered on this platform.
Nowadays, I’m back where I was five years earlier, observing a film that accomplishes the same feats with its own approach to musical cinema in The Gesuidouz, which is making the rounds at festivals following its world premiere in Toronto last Fall. Visitors: Complete Edition helmer Kenichi Ugana is back in the director’s chair for this outing with a cast led by Natsuko, Leo Imamura, Yutaka Kyan, and Rocko Zevenbergen, and a story that journeys between the Tokyo and the countryside, with sidequests into the minimally surreal for added effect.
To this, I ask you: When was the last time you watched a struggling punk band frontwoman toil away so hard at songwriting that her creative genius barfs up a living-breathing cassette tape with a personality of its own? That’s not even the wildest shit that happens in this movie and you’d have to see it to believe it, and trust that I’ll go into more about why.
Invariably though, there’s more to be gained in Ugana’s latest beyond the spectacle and genre tropes. The Gesuidouz also lends an inspiring and poignant tale that ultimately speaks to the heart of anyone who’s ever loved doing something so inexplicable that no one else could probably come close. This is the sort of narrative environment we find our characters in with Hanako, the lead singer of the titular band who gets confronted by a reporter with the question as to what “Punk” really means to her.
The Gesuidouz jumps back to a year earlier as 26-year old Hanako marks her next birthday as the day she expects to die like other rock legends at that age. Failing to perform a viable song and sell crowds beyond a few audience members, and tanking in album sales, their manager, Hayato (Yuya Endo) gives them an ultimatum: A job in the countryside where they can work a remote farm to pay back their debts while focusing on making a song that can sell a hit and get them on the map.
Their lacking farmhand abilities be damned, the beleagured quartet manage to earn the friendship and support of the handful of locals. This, coupled with Hanako’s musings of a talking Shiba Inu gifted to her, and the menacing mile-a-minute creative process she endures, eventually allow the band’s music to come into the fruition it needs. However, as with all tales of rockstars, one song isn’t enough.
Natsuko’s performance as Hanako is an outstanding one, topping off a roster where each character gets to shine on their own while in the backdrop; Imamura’s lead guitarist in Masao lends a point of satire as the obligatory band member with a certain addiction. Kyan’s wily-haired basist, Ryuzo, explores a touch of romantic interest in a fashionable farmgirl Moe, played by one of everyone’s favorite Baby Assassins, Saori Izawa who continues to show herself as an actress with plentiful depth and potential to her craft. Zevenbergen’s mohawk-wearing Santaro stands out the most as the band’s only white member, while he can cook as well as he can bang out a drumkit.
One of Hanako’s bigger aspects is her friendship with an old farmwoman named Tome Iizuka, played by Amano Mayumi. Theirs is an element to the story that compliments Hanako’s own quieted growth and introspection as an artist whose aforementioned fixations present a challenge in and of themselves, atttibuting greatly to the film’s subliminal messaging per the music genre at the film’s core.
The creative process here is epic in and of itself, watching the band evolve its sound from an unbearable cacophony of noise to something of actual musicianship. Fourth-wall breaks, generous name drops, a touch of slapstick and horror gags of various scales are on the menu for Ugana’s pseudo-fantastical musical oddity, topped off with cameos by filmmaker Joseph Kahn and Troma legend Lloyd Kaufman, and montages of extras culminating Ugana’s world in which The Gesuidouz are a rising force in punk.
Combined with an eccentric and unconstrained approach to storytelling that allows Ugana to poke some fun and cut loose, The Gesuidouz, loaded with hilarity and heart, delivers an eccentric adventurous, musical odyssey that encourages you to live for what you love.
The Gesuidouz enjoyed its North American Premiere for the 18th edition of Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.