Area XiII (left) and Pure Land
In the 1980s, two leprosy-themed films appeared on the Chinese screen at the same time, one was "Area 13" starring Jiang Lili and Wang Zhihua, and the other was "Pure Land" starring Xiao Xiong and Wang Xuexi.
Of course, this is related to the establishment of the Chinese Leprosy Prevention association at that time and the news reports that there are still hundreds of little-known leprosy villages in China, but leprosy suddenly became a popular theme in movies, which cannot be said to be influenced by the Japanese movie "Sand Ware".
Released in May 1980 in Chinese mainland, Sandware, based on Matsumoto Kiyoharu's speculative novel of the same name, tells the story of a genius musician who kills people to cover up the fact that his biological father is a leper.
At that time, Chinese audiences were very happy, ushering in the release of Agatha Christie's "Massacre on the Nile" a year ago, and just watched Seiichi Morimura's "Human Witness" half a year ago. In the world of speculative fiction, Seiichi Morimura is an apprentice of Kiyoharu Matsumoto, while Kiyoharu Matsumoto, along with Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, is known as the three giants of the world's mystery novel.
The introduction of "Sandware" was not smooth sailing, and there were two opinions at the initial review, one faction believed that "this film has a certain exposure effect on capitalist society, the actors and directors have merits, and can be released publicly", and the other faction believes that the film has "greater side effects and is not suitable for public release".
In fact, the real experts who hold the latter opinion are very familiar with Matsumoto Kiyoharu's original work, and after comparison, they find that this film has made a big hand and foot in the process of adaptation, of course, this hand and foot is also master-level.
Kiyoharu Matsumoto
Kiyoharu Matsumoto created 620 works in his lifetime, of which the most well-known and influential one is "SandWare". The mystery novel was serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun for a year from May 1960, and then published by The Kobunsha Society, and as soon as it was launched, it reached the 5th place in the 1961 book list, and was the best-selling literary book of the year. It was with the work "SandWare" that Matsumoto Kiyoharu realized the "Kiyoharu Revolution" of speculative fiction and established his status as the "father of socialist speculative fiction".
Created in the era of Japan's post-war economic development, when a new generation of social elites came to the fore, Matsumoto Kiyoharu keenly understood that the so-called success of these successful people was based on the deliberate concealment and forgetting of "history", and this extreme egoism and hypocrisy were very likely to develop into criminal motives. Therefore, through the shaping of He Yingliang, he visualized the subconscious impulse of the new post-war generation of post-war "father-killing" who tried to wash away his unclean origins and origins and shake off the burden of history.
In the original book, Waga Hideyoshi is a complete villain, and in addition to the murder of his adoptive father, there are several murders: he uses high-tech means of concealment to kill important witness Kuniro Miyata; in the same way, he tries to miscarry the girlfriend of critic Shigeo Sekikawa and kills him; in addition, the girlfriend who helped him destroy the evidence of the crime also commits suicide in despair.
Shochiku bought the rights to the book as early as the time when Sandware was serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun, but for some reason (Shochiku claimed to be "conceived for fourteen years," apparently as a propaganda term), it wasn't until 1974 that it was filmed. 1974 was a landmark year, when Japan's GNP grew negatively for the first time, and since then, sustained economic growth, which began in 1955, has come to an end. Since the beginning of the year, due to high prices, oil prices, economic crisis and other factors, Japan has been a crowd of panic, in this case, copying Matsumoto Kiyoharu's critical spirit to shoot "Sandware" is obviously inappropriate.
Shinobu Hashimoto (second from right) and director Yotaro Nomura (first from right) are on the set of sand ware
As a result, Shochiku handed over the power to adapt "Sandware" to two masters, one Ishimoto Shinobu and the other Yamada Yoji. Hashimoto Shinobu was the royal screenwriter of Akira Kurosawa, writing the scripts for Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, but he himself has a fondness for reasoning movies, after Matsumoto Kiyoharu's "Surveillance", "Focus of Zero", "Flag of the Mist" and "Shadow Car" were adapted into films by his hand, so he was the screenwriter who knew Matsumoto Kiyoharu best, and Yoji Yamada was known as "the spokesperson of the Japanese soul", recognized as the film master who understood the hearts of the Japanese, and the Injiro series he directed was well known in Japan. It is quite popular with the audience.
Shinobu Hashimoto and Yoji Yamada made three major changes to the original book while retaining the basic plot of "Sandware", first replacing the original story with the current time frame of the 70s for reinterpretation;
The second is to portray Kazuka Asahi as a sympathetic tragic character, not only cutting out his other crimes outside of the main case, but also making his killing of Kenichi Miki a last resort. For this reason, an important plot was deliberately added to the film, that is, he and He Yingliang's biological father, Honura Chiyoyoshi, were still alive in the sanatorium, and He Yingliang was forced to meet with his biological father by Kenichi Miki, and he had no choice but to poison his hand.
At the same time, the film also completely beautifies his original identity as a "pseudo-composer", portraying him as an all-round musical genius who combines composition, performance and conducting. As a result, music has become a very important means of artistic expression in the movie "SandWare", playing the role of killing two birds with one stone, not only presenting the inner activities and spiritual world of the criminals who have not been shown in the original work, but also introducing the important theme of "fate" for the film.
The climax of the film is with He Yingliang conducting and playing his piano concerto "Fate" in a solo concert, at the same time, the Metropolitan Police Department held a joint meeting, and the criminal police reported the results of the case investigation. In this passage, along with Imanishi's narration of Kazuka Hideyoshi's childhood experience and kazuka's own piano performance in another space, the third narrative line of the Early Motoura father and son wandering around Japan is revealed to the audience. The parallel montage passages that intersect the three narrative lines are 40 minutes long, maximizing the use of the film's unique audiovisual means to create a tear gas-like touching effect.
The fate of the characters blends with the natural landscapes of the different seasons of the Japanese archipelago, giving a strong layer of nation-state color and universality to the personal experience before the war with He Yingliang. As a result, what this passage shows is no longer limited to an unfortunate personal history that occurred before the war, but has become a symbolic portrayal of the pre-war experience and collective memory shared by the Japanese people, which is enough to arouse the affection and resonance of all adult Japanese audiences in the 70s.
At this point, the film has completed one of the most important changes to the original work, introducing the theme into the direction of fatalism, rationalizing the crime of hiding history, and greatly deviating from the critical realism spirit of Matsumoto Kiyoharu's social speculative fiction. At the end of the film, subtitles are used to explain, "Patients like Chiyoyoshi Honura no longer exist in Japan." However, no matter how life's journey changes, the fate of a Father and a Son like this can never be changed! This passage, which elevates the film's theme, conveys a kind of sadness that was suppressed in people's hearts under the surface of Japanese social prosperity in the 1970s — no matter how hard future generations try, they can never get rid of the "historical" shadow left by their predecessors.
The movie "Sandware" attributes all the circumstances of the protagonist, even the final path of crime due to extreme egoism, to being at the mercy of fate, which is where the "side effect" of the film lies. As Chen Duchen, a Japanese film research expert, pointed out in a film review written at the time, "This conclusion is difficult to agree with, and we can only come to the correct conclusion by using a materialist point of view, from the social background in which the protagonist lives and his ideological consciousness, and simply using the word 'fate' to summarize everything, it is inevitable to promote fatalism, thus weakening the theme of the film exposing the evil roots of capitalist society." ”
Fortunately, "SandWare" finally passed the censorship and was released in China, but the whole process was carried out in a very contradictory situation, on the one hand, the audience was moved to cry in the theater, and on the other hand, the newspapers and periodicals constantly published articles such as "How to See "Sandware", so that people could dry their tears and recognize the essence of capitalist society that encourages individual struggle, free competition, the survival of the fittest, and the predation of the weak. To some extent, "Sandware" was released in China as a revealing film and a critical textbook.
In Japan, "Sandware" was unanimously recognized by the audience and critics, and won the second place in the 1974 "Film Shunbao" Top Ten Awards, second only to "Wangxiang". Matsumoto Kiyoharu himself believes that the film is a very successful adaptation, even surpassing the original book.
Yoshitaro Nomura (first from right) directs filming
In addition to two heavyweight screenwriters, "Sandware" concentrates the elite power of the Japanese film industry in the 70s, and the director is Nomura Yoshitaro, matsumoto Kiyoharu's most trusted, who has directed 8 reasoning films based on Matsumoto Kiyoharu's novels in his lifetime, and is known as the first Japanese reasoning film. One of the composers, Yashi Wasagawa, is the son of the Japanese literary giant Ryunosuke Wasagawa, who borrowed Beethoven's Symphony of Destiny to compose the symphony "Fate" in the film, which was praised by the Japanese film industry as a "pyramid work".
In order to take into account the overseas market, the film specially invited Tetsuro Tanba, who had already made a name for himself in the international film industry at that time, to play the male No. 1 Imasai criminal policeman, who had starred in the 1966 007 movie "Iron King Kong Breaks Rocket Ridge", and also played the role of Lu Junyi in the "Water Margin" directed by Hong Kong director Zhang Che. His tough appearance and calm and introverted performance style show the talent of expressing the profound psychology of the characters in the role of Imanishi.
Kato, who plays Hideyoshi Kato, has previously starred in another adaptation of Kiyoharu Matsumoto, Shadow Car, directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. At that time, he had just co-starred in the bitter love movie "Oshawa" with Kurihara Komaki, not only his acting skills were proven, but his handsome appearance and temperament were well received by the audience, and he was later called "the world's three beautiful men" along with Alain Delong and Zun long by Japanese TV host Matsumoto. In "Sand Ware", although he played a pianist who was naturally lost, he was so impressed by Chinese audiences that after the film's release, the large pointed-collar shirt and suit he wore were once popular in China.
On June 18, 2018, Tsuyoshi Kato died of gallbladder cancer at the age of 80.