Directed
by Higuchinsky, 2000, 58 mins. starring Horiuchi Masami, Kashiwabara
Shuuji, Tsugumi, Eriko Hatsune and Tsuda Kenjirou. Based on a Junji
Ito manga, "Itou Junji Kyoufu Collection: Nagai yume"
originally published by Asahi Sonorama.
After
the enormous critical and public success in 2000 of Uzumaki,
based on Junji Ito's tour-de-force horror manga series and directed
by the frankly astonishing Higuchinsky, it seemed pretty inevitable
that the two forces who brought us that stunning movie should work
together again. And in the same year of Uzumaki's release,
lucky Japanese TV viewers got to witness their second joint project,
Long Dream (aka Nagai yume), a short movie commissioned
for TV.
Despite
an infinitely reduced budget, a rotten tinkly-piano soundtrack which
is an offense to the eardrums, and the obvious constraints of filming
a TV movie, not to mention only clocking in at a woefully short
58 minutes, Higuchinsky manages (yet again!) to achieve the almost-impossible:
he maintains the same weird and wonderful, stylish atmosphere
and visuals that he first displayed in Uzumaki. OK, so
the monster make-up is cheap and cheerful: compared to the previous
movie's special effects, Long Dream looks positively creaky
and won't be fooling anyone anytime soon.
But it soon becomes apparent that the film's budget shortcomings
are completely irrelevant, because the simple fact of the matter
is that no-one understands and interprets Junji Ito's weird, wild
world half as well as Higuchinsky. And his eye for colour, space
and composition is in no way diminished by the simple lack of funding.
Having by now seen Ataru Oikawa's feeble stab at Tomie,
and Norio Tsuruta's mediocre Kakashi,
it seems pretty apparent that if you're going to make an Ito-manga
live-action movie, Higuchinsky is your man. The
visuals are as engagingly surreal and brain-bendingly psychedelic
as Uzumaki, and the plot every bit as bizarre, unique and
unhinged as you'd expect from an Ito story, with an twist in the
ending I didn't see coming at all. So overlooking the £25
spent on foam rubber, bald wigs and snooker balls is pretty easy,
because everything looks exactly how Ito would no doubt have wanted
it to. There are also some very cute visual references to classic
German silent movies such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, which
was no doubt some influence on Higuchinsky's aesthetic for the movie.
As
for the acting, well, if you've already seen Uzumaki you'll
no doubt spot a couple of familiar revenants from that movie in
the shape of Eriko Hatsune (Sakurai Kana), who doesn't really get
the chance to show off her skills, seeing as how her role pretty
much entails floating around winsomely, and spinning a red umbrella,
which is a shame; and also Horiuchi Masami, who, paradoxically enough,
gets to show off more of his skills than he did in Uzumaki,
giving a thorougly likeable, sinister and delicious performance
as the deranged Doctor Kuroda. The overall acting quality is really
too fine for what is, in effect, an hour-long TV special, which
just makes me even more jealous of lucky Japanese TV audiences,
after the roaring success of KTV having commissioned the equally
genius director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to make Kourei
- believe me, this is not the kind of thing you'll find
airing on UK prime-time TV, more's the pity ;-)
Synopsis
In
an fairly ordinary hospital somewhere in Tokyo, two doctors, one
who is a famous and well-respected neurologist by the name of Doctor
Kuroda Shuusuke (Horiuchi
Masami),
and the other a young assistant called Yamauchi (Tsuda Kenjirou),
are visiting one of the patients under their care, a pretty young
girl called Takeshima Mami (Tsugumi). Despite having been told that
her ailment, a benign brain tumour, is not life-threatening, she
is completely hysterical with fear, screaming that she's been visited
by the spirit of Death in the night, in the shape of a horrible,
inhuman monster, with giant, staring eyeballs and long, evil claws.
However,
Doctor Kuroda tries to soothe her by telling her that she wasn't
visited by Death at all, but rather by another patient under his
care, a young man named Mukoda Tetsurou (played very engagingly
by Kashiwabara Shuuji). Poor old Mukoda was admitted to hospital
himself only a few days beforehand, with a very odd complaint: he
claims that time passes in his dreams differently to everyone else.
In
fact, his dreams are slowly but surely lengthening to a point where
several years are passing in merely a few seconds. And not only
are the long dreams taking a toll on his body, causing strange alien-like
genetic mutations, but they're taking a heavy toll on his mind;
he can no longer distinguish between the sleeping and the waking
worlds, between dreams and reality.
And
that was the reason why he paid a little impromptu visit to Mami
the night before: in his dream, which lasted well over a decade,
he believed that he had been married to Mami for many years, so
that when he woke and went to visit "his wife" Mami in
her hospital room, he was completely confused, not only as to why
she didn't recognise him, but why she got hysterical at the sight
of him and called him 'shinigami' (roughly translated,
it means 'the god of Death'). Of course, in reality she was truly
petrified by his weird appearance and hearing him calling out her
name as if he had come to claim her (despite not having the customary
black robe and scythe to hand).
Naturally
enough, Doctor Yamauchi is not only baffled by this bizarre case,
but equally baffled by Kuroda's willingness - nay, massive enthusiasm
- to investigate the causes of Mukoda's strange affliction extremely
closely. However, Doctor Kuroda is not letting him into his secret,
which is the real reason that he wants to find out everything he
can about the 'long dreams' before it ends up killing poor old Mukoda:
an old girlfriend of his, Sakurai Kana (Eriko Hatsune), once suffered
from exactly the same problem. Except that in her case,
when her dreams became insupportably long, she disappeared completely,
leaving behind only a mysterious note for her grief-stricken lover
to find, telling him she would wait for him '...in the world
of the eternal dream'.
And
so Kuroda performs lots and lots of tests on Mukoda, trying to find
out the secret of what causes the 'long dream' illness; but sadly,
it's not until Mukoda finally disappears himself, under extremely
strange circumstances, that the doctor discovers the secret of the
mysterious malady: a strange red crystal which had either lodged
in, or grown in, Mukoda's brain.
Simultaneously
intrigued and baffled, and with more than a few ulterior motives
of his own, Kuroda secretly sets to work conducting sinister tests
with this new, weird substance. But Yamauchi has become suspicious
of the good doctor's deeds: Kuroda has ordered him to observe Mami's
progress and mental state very closely. But when she tells him that
not only have her dreams been strangely long lately, but
also that she's been having evil thoughts about a nurse, who she
claims has been playing around with her boyfriend, Doctor Kuroda,
Yamauchi is terrified - she seems to have caught Mukoda's illness!
But is the 'long dream' disease truly contagious? What is Kuroda
really up to with his secret tests? And why does the loopy doctor
keep having heart-breaking visions of his long-disappeared love
Kana at strange times, talking to her even though no-one else can
see her?
The
premise of Long Dream is, at its core, a really fascinating
idea: what would happen to an ordinary human if, for some unknown
reason, the amount of time which passes in their dreams started
to get longer, and longer, eventually spanning not merely years,
or decades, or even centuries, but forever? What effect,
if any, would it have on their bodies, not to mention their brains?
And what on earth would it be like to wake from a dream in which
it felt to you like a hundred years had passed during only thirty
seconds?
Ito's
story plays on some very old human vulnerabilities, such as spatial
and time awareness, which can easily be destroyed by such things
as neurological illness, or drugs, and raises a peculiarly unsettling
idea - that we are only barely in control of our lives and our perceptions
at the best of times, and that madness can creep in at any time,
for any reason. Reality is never as solid and secure as we'd like
to think, and no-one is necessarily safe. And there is a real eye-opener
of a plot twist at the end, which your humble reviewer didn't see
coming at all ;-)
All
in all, Long Dream is a corker of a 58-minute TV special,
really entertaining and well-paced, with great acting and some gorgeous
visuals. You can almost always guarantee that when Ito and Higuchinsky's
worlds collide, there'll be a genius product at the end of it, no
matter what the budget limitations may be. There are also some really
fantastic extras on the DVD which include a long interview
with Junji Ito, Higuchinsky and the stars of the show, which are
sadly unsubtitled, but still well worth watching (even if you can't
understand a word) just to get a glimpse of some original (and mainly
unfinished!) Ito drawings. If you loved Uzumaki, you'll
no doubt find a warm spot in your heart for Long Dream.
Editor's
Note : Subtitles on the English version of Nagai yume were translated
from the original Japanese by the Net's leading Junji Ito expert,
Alexis Glass of junjiito.mutagene.net
- not Cannibal King as it states in the end credits of the movie.
This is the proper and correct credit for the translation.
Snowblood
Apple Rating for this film:
Entertainment value: 8/10
Chills: 1/10
Violence: 7/10
Sex: 0/10
Laughs: 7/10 - mainly for the makeup, it has to be said ;-)
Gory Murders: 1.... or is it 2?
Monster Makeup: probably available at your local novelty shop at
a low, low cost - either that or customise a couple of bald wigs
and ping-pong balls for the same effect
Is There A False Ending? - you bet there is, and it's a
doozy ;-)
Number of Geniuses Involved In This Production: 2, at least
Litres of Tomato Ketchup: more than a bottle but less than a tanker
***Recommended***
Long
Dream Wallpaper
You can download this wallpaper here: [800x600]
[1024x768]
Wallpaper credit: Alex Apple, 2003
Snowblood Apple Filmographies
Higuchinsky
Horiuchi Masami
Eriko Hatsune
Tsugumi
Kashiwabara Shuuji
Links
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of reviews or pages
online about this movie yet, so the links list is going to be a
little lighter than usual - sorry!
http://junjiito.mutagene.net/
- the amazing Alexis Glass has a very dedicated Junji Ito site,
featuring reviews of pretty much all the movies ever made based
on Ito's manga, including a great review of Nagai yume
with comments and images from the film
http://www.fjmovie.com/horror/t7/98.html
- a very useful page about Nagai yume at the great dictionary
of all things Japanese and horror, FJ Movie. Features cast/crew
details and a short synopsis
http://www.thirteens.net/~ghc/misc/a/itoujun.htm
- A huge list of pretty much everything Junji Ito has ever
written and drawn, with references and some comments
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