Yoshii is kind of a jerk. He’s not a monster, nor violent, mean, or aggressive. He’s just kind of callous, and not very likable. We first meet him bargaining with an old man who has a stock of his invention he can’t sell. Yoshii is offering him peanuts. It’s less than the man would have to pay to have it hauled away as junk, so he takes it.
Buy Cure (Criterion Collection) Blu-rayYoshii resells them on-line for immense profit, making millions of yen from a less than 100,000 yen investment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: the old man couldn’t sell them. Yoshii could. But it feels exploitative.
And when a friend who is also a reseller wants Yoshii to invest a little in a business opportunity, he says he can’t afford it. He can, he just made that big score, but he just doesn’t want to spend the money. Again, he has no obligation to invest, but it makes him a little less likable.
These petty grievances accumulate, and Yoshii finds regular trouble for himself. Someone leaves a dead, rotting rat outside his door. He crashes his motorcycle on his route home from his day job. Someone had strung wire across the road. Who knows if it was for him? But it seems more and more someone’s out to get him.
So, he moves to the country to a house with his girlfriend, where he can expand his business in peace. He hires a local to be his assistant, though Yoshii’s so guarded about his business he barely has work for the assistant to do. Things don’t go so well. The girlfriend leaves. And the assistant discovers that there’s a lot of hate for this on-line reseller. He even has an enemies’ group on-line.
And one day, that group finds where his new home is, and decides to act.
Cloud is the latest film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has been a highlight of the Japanese cinema scene for the last three decades. His earliest directing credits were low budget action and horror thrillers. He knows how to make a little go a long way. In particular, he is an absolute master at controlled framing and composition. He can change the mood and heighten the tension of a scene with the simple combination of camera and in-frame movements. The camera pans down, then back up. A space previously empty is filled with something we hadn’t seen before, usually something frightening. He knows how to craft images for maximum impact.
Cloud is a thriller, and a social satire about the way people interact. Yoshii isn’t very nice to people. The people on the Internet aren’t very nice to him. And ultimately, their minor troubles boil over into extreme violent action.
But with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, even action doesn’t mean pulses pounding, loud music, and quick cuts. His filmmaking is always very deliberate and controlled, and the violence in his movies tends to be filmed almost objectively. It’s just a thing that happens on screen. That coldness can sometimes give it a greater impact than emotionally driven manipulated “thrills.”
Cloud is also laced with humor, but most of it is dry or situational. A scene of Yoshii just not wanting his former boss to know he’s home is filmed like a horror movie. One of the group attacking him thinks they should wear masks, so he does. He’s totally committed to the bit, even if nobody else is.
The film is deliberately paced. There’s barely a plot, and what’s there takes its time. Scenes accumulate to develop attitudes rather than story beats. Some scenes that don’t make much sense resonate in retrospect as everyone’s resentments are laid bare.
Also, at the end there’s a lot of guys shooting at each other in an abandoned factory. That’s always fun.
I’ve trod lightly on what I think are spoilers, but with a movie that’s as enigmatic in its thrills as this one, it’s hard to know what to say and what to keep hidden. Like all Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies, Cloud rewards attention. This is not a movie that spells itself out in neon lights and simple crayon drawings. And like all Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies, it’s beautifully shot, beautifully acted, with incredible deliberate sound design.
I was engaged throughout the entire film, but I had to be to get what it was offering. Even though it’s a violent action thriller, Cloud is not an easy entertainment. If you don’t choose to engage with it, it could easily slide by you. But it’s all centered around a deeply intriguing question: what if everyone around you just kind of low key hates you, and does something about it?
Cloud is opening today, July 25th, at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles.
