Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cinematography by Junichiro Hayashi
Edited by Junichi Kikuchi
Music by Gary Ashiya
Starring
Koji Yakusho as Yabuike
Hiroyuki Ikeuchi as Kiriyama
Jun Fubuki as Jinbo
Yoriko Douguchi as Chizuru
Ren Osugi as Nakasone
Akira Otaka as Tsuboi
Yutaka Matsushige as Nekojima
. . .
“things are gonna slide . . . in all directions
won’t be nothing . . . you can measure anymore”
-Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
“The past is a vast open sea on which you have drifted
A spell they call history that now has been lifted”
-Lucy Monostone, “Strange New World”
“Call the twenty-first century
Tell it
Give us a break”
-St. Vincent, “Every Tear Disappears”
“Restore the Rules of the World.”
-ultimatum issued by an armed hostage taker in the movie Charisma (1999)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Charisma is a mystery thriller revolving around a disgraced cop who finds himself in a dark forest where various people are fighting over a strange tree. This is from writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose eerie horror thrillers Cure and Pulse have been well-established as cult classics by this point. Charisma falls between these other two movies both chronologically and in terms of its genre fidelity. I wouldn’t call Charisma a horror film, exactly, although it does have some unsettling scenes. Like Cure it stars Koji Yakusho as a police detective in a long coat who wrestles with difficult moral dilemmas. Like Pulse it portrays a world spinning out into chaos. Unlike Cure, the Koji Yakusho character is much less attached to his view of the world. Unlike Pulse there’s no discernible supernatural influence upon events as they unfold. In Cure a sinister man with hypnotic powers corrupts previously normal people triggering a chain reaction of brutal murders. Pulse depicts a world in which the Internet becomes a reality shattering incubator for unhappy ghosts. Charisma portrays a world in which humans approach the world rationally, profits or glory or ideals in mind, and cannot help but destroy everything including themselves, no malicious Mesmerists or World Wide Web spirits necessary. You could say that the people in Charisma hypnotize themselves by projecting their phantom visions onto an otherwise indifferent Nature which acts as a mirror or screen for various human desires.
Charisma begins with a man suffering beneath the weight of his job: an overworked police detective who seems to be living in the basement of a police station. His name’s Yabuike, and we first meet him as he sleeps on a bench in a dim, dungeon-like room. Yabuike’s superior wakes him up to give him a hair-raising assignment.
A gunman has taken an elected official hostage. Yabuike is sent to resolve the crisis. The hostage taker has a simple demand written on a sheet of paper: Restore the Rules of the World. Yabuike walks into the office where the gunman has holed up with his hostage, draws his gun . . . but then he re-holsters it, and walks out of the room. The gunman executes the politician. A half dozen cops blast the gunman. The situation is a disaster. When asked by his superior why he didn’t shoot when he had the chance Yabuike says he thought he should try to save both the criminal and the victim. Yabuike is placed on mandatory leave, essentially scapegoated for the catastrophe.
One might question why, exactly, such a fraught situation was placed upon one man’s shoulders, but maybe it is because Yabuike is a Movie Cop Protagonist who is expected to resolve situations with quick thinking and quick shooting. Like, say, Dirty Harry. But Yabuike doesn’t work like Dirty Harry. Yabuike isn’t a right wing jerk-off fantasy, an exterminator of human vermin. He perceived the gunman and his hostage as the tragic outcomes of a larger systemic failure. Perhaps one could say Yabuike was right to refuse to live up to the expectations of being a Violent Movie Cop Protagonist. And yet his actions got both the perpetrator and victim killed. From this low point of failure, Yabuike decides to leave the city for a vast forest, perhaps never to return, as there are dark implications of suicidal depression driving the disgraced cop. Or maybe this is just how Yabuike likes to spend his vacation time. To his credit, he calls home to check in with his family, which is nice, but this phone call is the first and last communication he has with them in the entire movie. Perhaps Yabuike is in the process of a divorce? Is that why he was sleeping at the police station? Is crime so out of control that a Movie Cop doesn’t have time to go off the clock let alone sleep? We’re never given an answer. We the Audience are left to deduce Yabuike’s detachment from his wife and child-children?-by judging his words and deeds as they happen on screen. Yabuike seems to walk away from his job, his family, and from whatever kind of life he had in the city without too much inner static, as though he had made up his mind some time ago. Yabuike is a man of both ideals-in the civic arena-and surprisingly hard-hearted pragmatism-in the domestic arena. You could look at what happens in Charisma as a playing out of this profound inner conflict between a duty to the larger world and a self-serving personal desire.
Out in the forest, Yabuike finds an abandoned car in which he tries to spend the night. Someone lights the car on fire. Yabuike suffers burn injuries, but survives. Somehow he manages to crawl free of the torched vehicle, and makes his way to a clearing in which stands a withered tree supported by an improvised framework of metal pipes and joints. Later, Yabuike meets someone who claims to have rescued him from the burning car. Even later we are led to suspect that Yabuike’s rescuer may have also started the fire. The whole sequence plays like a shadowy, unsettling dream-and maybe that’s how Yabuike experienced this ordeal.
Yabuike’s brush with fiery death leads him to convalesce in a set of abandoned buildings where what appears to be a forestry survey team has set up base camp. This team is led by a man named Nakasone who consults with another man named Tsuboi who claims to work for an environmental protection agency. Nakasone asks Yabuike a few questions, but makes it clear that everyone out here in the woods isn’t too concerned with prying into each other’s pasts. Nakasone even refers to the area as being a town, although the buildings are all decrepit, and the survey team seems to be its only population. Yabuike is provided some food, and Tsuboi allows the recently burned policeman to accompany him on a trip into another part of the forest. On this trip Yabuike again encounters the withered tree supported by the kludged together gantry-like structure. Tsuboi informs Yabuike that they shouldn’t go near the tree because it is defended by a strange man who attacks anyone who approaches. Yabuike goes up to the tree. Tsuboi voices concern even while he takes lots of pictures of the tree up close. Tsuboi appears to be emboldened by Yabuike’s presence even as he is obviously nervous about being attacked by the tree’s defender. Even though Yabuike hasn’t outed himself as a cop at this point there’s just something about the way he marches forward into situations that projects authority. I think Yabuike, despite his disillusionment, still clings to his role as an arbiter of law and order.
Yabuike soon enough encounters Kiriyama, the strange, aggressive young man who guards the tree. Kiriyama wields a sword in defense of the tree which he has named Charisma. Yabuike hangs out with Kiriyama for a while thus putting the cop at odds with the forestry survey team who want to cut down Charisma. Yabuike isn’t sold on Kiriyama’s whacked-out eco-fascist speeches justifying his defense of the tree, but he also suspects the survey team is not what it appears to be, and so the policeman drifts between the camps trying to figure it all out.
There are also a pair of sisters-Jinbo and Chizuru-who are conducting scientific research on the ecology of the forest. Jinbo believes that Charisma is a toxic invasive species that needs to be destroyed which puts her at odds with Kiriyama and the survey team. Yabuike drifts among these different factions like a more benign version of Toshiro Mifune’s Yojimbo. Mifune’s mercenary creates chaos for profit by manipulating rival gangs into destroying each other. Yabuike sorta just meets people where they’re at, asks questions, accepts food when offered, and gradually climbs out of his depression and despair as he finds new purpose in the heart of a forest of confusion.
Inevitably, Yabuike must return to the city he abandoned. I don’t want to give it away, but Charisma builds to a helluva final scene. The implications are both disturbing and exhilarating. Yabuike’s quest to understand the “Rules of the World” leads him to face the limits of his power with renewed moral strength. It’s not necessarily the case that Yabuike can save the world, but he is no longer afraid to do what he can. A tough road to walk for sure.
Also, think about how Yabuike learns to use his gun by movie’s end. He’s no Dirty Harry, but he finds his own way to throw a shot . . .
