This film looks and feels like a Japanese production. Many of the techniques are lifted directly from Japanese cinema so, right from the get-go, it surprises by being a French director and screenwriter in a majorly European production with support from France’s Canal+, Italy’s Rai Uno and several other countries’ involvement. Given the subject matter, I imagine that this is a film that couldn’t be made in or by Japan, a bit like 1976’s Ai no korîda (In the realm of the senses) by Nagisa Ôshima.
The film’s subject, Hiro Onoda (played here by Kanji Tsuda), is first seen when he meets a young tourist, Norio Suzuki (Taiga Nakano). We then flash back to Onoda’s training as a young man (here played by Yûya Endô). It’s 1944, World War II is raging and Japan decides to create an elite unit of troops to infiltrate Lubang in the Philippines to act as a guerilla warfare unit against American forces in the area. We’re all old bastards on this list (well, in the majority) so perhaps you remember tales of a Japanese soldier that didn’t know that WWII was over until the 1970s? This is that soldier, this is his story.
Once Onoda’s training is complete, his major, Yoshimi Taniguchi (Issei Ogata, in great form) reveals the plan and ships the new elite unit to Lubang where trouble starts. Without revealing more, soon the team is whittled down to four. Lieutenant Hiro Onoda, his right-hand man, Kinshichi Kozuka (Yûya Matsuura), a very young conscript, Yuichi Akatsu (Kai Inowak) and a soldier that never leaves Akatsu’s side and is mentoring him, Shoichi Shimada (Shinsuke Kato). By 1950, it all gets too much for Akatsu, who deserts his team-mates. They watch him leave (if this had been a film that wasn’t in a Japanese style, his commanding officer might have shot him in the back for desertion but here they just watch passively, one even offering wishes of luck).
The film jumps to 1969. Japan has sent a delegation to tell Onoda the war is over and they’ve brought his father and brother to convince but Onoda sees conspiracy everywhere and refuses the information, even using his father’s use of Onoda, jr.’s favourite haiku to uncover a secret coded message that the remaining team should rendezvous at a beach for extraction. It’s perhaps pointless to say it, but this section of the film reminded me so much of the contested US election results with people grasping at ever thinner straws to prove that trump really won and it made me as sad for Onoda as I am for the poor deluded dupes that cling to trump (who only cares for them as a route to power). Anyway, back to the film. By now, only Onoda and Kozuka remain and they listen to the moon landing together, going out to steal more batteries when their radio’s batteries run out.
Next stop, 1974, and we see a young man patiently set up a marquee with a Japanese flag and a tape player blaring out a song Onoda-san and his team have been singing since they met in 1944, and moving around Lubang when he doesn’t entice Onoda from the jungle. Eventually, they do meet up, whereupon the tourist, Suzuki, tells Onoda he’s on a mission with three objectives – he wanted to see a panda in the wild, he wanted to meet Onoda and he wants to see the yeti (the film doesn’t cover Suzuki’s success with the yeti, perhaps it’s a tease for a sequel?).
The end of the film is amazing. The expressions that move over Onoda’s face as he realises that he might have wasted thirty years of his life are incredible. The fact-check he employs, to be sure Suzuki isn’t just playing for a fool) is also very well done and a good example of the critical thinking he failed to deploy back in 1969.
In terms of the mechanical nature of the film, it’s very naturalistically-shot but there are formal touches from Japanese cinema such as sliding the camera across the face of someone to reveal what there are looking at rather than just widening the shot. Overall, this is a fantastic film from top to bottom. I can’t comment on the soundtrack or even if there was one. The soldiers sing, the radio plays music but… Anyway, Onoda is a long film but I was never tired by it and it’s definitely on a shortlist of favourite films this year. 5/5
Discover more from Ben Vost
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.