In a Japanese suburban town, a young woman, Saori, worries about the suddenly withdrawn and secretive attitude of her 11-year-old boy Minato. When she learns that her son was allegedly abused by Michitoshi, his teacher, Saori immediately demands accountability from the latter. However, Minato’s transformation has more to do with an incident involving another student: Yori, who is the victim of bullying by his peers. In MonsterScreenplay Prize and the Queer Palme at Cannes, Hirokazu Kore-eda reconnects with two of his favorite themes: childhood and deceptive appearances.
Told from the point of view of the mother, the teacher and, finally, the child, the new film from the director of Nobody knows (better known under the title Nobody Knows), Like father, like son, A family matter (Or Shoplifters) And The lucky stars (Or Broker) indeed reserves many revelations in relation to Minato, but also to Yori.
“What I initially read was not a screenplay, but rather a summary of the plot written by Yuji Sakamoto,” explains the filmmaker during an interview which took place as part of the International Film Festival of Toronto in September.
“I was immediately captivated. As I read, I kept wondering what it was really about, and was surprised at every turn. It was obvious to me that I could not have written or even imagined such a story. »
You must know that Monster is the first of his films, since Maborosi, in 1995, which Hirokazu Kore-eda did not script. However, over the years, the director has often stated that he would like to collaborate with screenwriter and playwright Yuji Sakamoto. With its complex mechanics, the draft of Monster he liked it straight away.
“The division into three chapters, into three distinct points of view, was already established in the preliminary version that I initially read. This is one of the aspects that fascinated me the most. »
Beyond Rashōmon
In this regard, and this is how Thierry Frémaux presented it in Cannes, Monster can evoke the memory of RashōmonAkira Kurosawa’s masterpiece in which different testimonies on the same event reveal divergent versions of the facts.
The aim of Kurosawa’s film was to demonstrate that truth can be a fickle concept. Knowing this, kinship between Monster And Rashōmon only applies to a certain extent.
In fact, during games where Monster connects with the gaze of Saori, then of Michitoshi, the comparison is justified. In that, through Minato’s mother and teacher, the film offers contradictory readings of key events. The vision of these two characters is also limited, because it depends on partial knowledge of the facts.
Conversely, when Minato takes over the narrative, his vision is not “limited”, but global, since it is his experience of which he has complete (and not “partial”) knowledge. Here, we are no longer at all in the model nor, moreover, in the concerns of Rashōmon. Ultimately, Monster does not so much explore the notion of truth as it carefully observes how the silent dismay of a child can be misunderstood or go unnoticed by adults who are nevertheless loving and full of good will.
This adult blindness is a recurring motif in Kore-eda. A humanist, the filmmaker generally suggests that the thing can be remedied: Monster is no exception.
Question of perception
Another fundamental distinction between Rashōmon And Monster lies in the way of approaching the three protagonists. In this respect, the two films are polar opposites, as Hirokazu Kore-eda points out.
” In the case of Rashōmon, the same actors had to become completely different characters depending on what testimony was reconstructed. In the case of my film, it’s not that at all: the characters remain the same from beginning to end, regardless of the dominant point of view of the moment. What changes is not the characters, but the audience’s perception of the characters. »
It is by playing on this perception, or even these perceptions, that Monster manages to captivate and, ultimately, upset.
Shocks and splendors of childhood