| Sleeping Man/Nemuru Otoko (1996) |
| Cast: Sung-kee Ahn ... Takuji Christine Hakim ... Tia Koji Yakusho ... Atsushi Kamimura Takahiro Tamura ...Denjibei Jun Hamamura ... Old man at post office Masao Imafuku ... Kiyoji Akiko Nomura ... Fumi Ittoku Kishibe ... Chief |
| Running time: 103 min Release Date: February 3, 1996 Directed by Kohei Oguri Writing credits: Kiyoshi Kenmochi Kohei Oguri |
| "Nemuru Otoko" directed by Kohei Oguri is a static and poetic film. The setting is a village, which could be found anywhere in rural Japan now. The film shows a sequence of beautiful village scenes with mountains, rivers and fields under four seasons. In this village, as the seasons shift, villagers' lives also shift; a man dies and a baby is born. The theme of this film seems to be human life and the rythm of nature on the same level. One of the villagers, Kamimura(Koji Yakusho), is a middle-aged electrical shop keeper. When the story begins, we find that Kamimura's routine now is to visit his old primary school friend, Takuji at his home in the village; Takuji is unconcious as a result of an accident in the mountains. Kamimura, lying down beside Takuji, talks to him in a quite natural manner as if his friend were listening to him. Kamimura is a man who has long lived in the village, succeeding his father at his small electrical shop, whereas Takuji seems to have been a great traveling man who has returned recently from a long journey to the Andes, only to end up by going into a coma after falling down the crags of the local mountains. |
| There is nothing dramatic happens in this film where ordinary people's mundane lives are shown; only the glimpses of the sleeping Takuji cohere the scattered scenes. Koji speaks each of Kamimura's lines slowly and calmly with a regional accent peculiar to Gunma Prefecture. Koji says in an interview that the director Kohei Oguri asked him to speak each of his lines which do not take a minute, slowly, far from a daily conversation pace. In Oguri's view, since each scene is very static, the performers' speaking pace must match the gradual change of scenes. Certainly the film is benefitted by Koji's calm and mild tone of speech when he speaks some remarks suggesting the theme of the film; and the fact that he has got a beautiful baritone voice duplicates the impression. |
| Kamimura (Yakusho) and Tia (Christine Hakim) at the deserted cottage. |
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| Kamimura and his classmates. They talk about Takuji. |
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| I met the Indonesian actress, Ms Christine Hakim, who played the role of Tia in this film, at Iwanami Hall movie theater,Kanda, Tokyo in June, 1996.@ Ms Hakim visited the theater to see the film together with the audience that day and agreed to give her autograph to anybody who wanted it.@She kindly put her autograph on the first page of my film program; Christine in English and Hakim in Japanese (Katakana). This film program has become my treasure. She was so beautiful!@Ms Hakim's performance in this film was very impressive. |
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