"Eureka"

Indie movies go global with a four-hour Japanese film that, like life, keeps going -- even if you sneak off to the bathroom.

By Andrew O'Hehir

May 4, 2001 | Can a movie that's twice as long as ordinary movies still be small? Such is the conundrum posed by "Eureka," a seemingly directionless but hypnotic odyssey through contemporary Japan that finally reaches U.S. theaters this week after becoming a film-festival sensation over the last year or so. If you've never seen anything quite like this apocalyptic, sepia-toned road movie before -- writer-director Shinji Aoyama has suggested that it's a remake of John Ford's "The Searchers," partly inspired by the Sonic Youth album "Daydream Nation" -- it nonetheless fits a pattern we might call the indie cinema of globalization.

As mainstream movies all over the world melt together into one smirking, ass-kicking blur, independent cinema is also converging, albeit in a much different fashion. Borrowing both from Hollywood genres like the thriller or the western and from the "village film," directors from literally every continent are exploring the bewildering, dislocating and sometimes liberating effects of global culture on isolated provincial life. So "Eureka," with its vision of Kyushu, in rural southwestern Japan, as a society traumatized by sudden violence, uprooted from the past but not quite Westernized, belongs to a tradition that extends far beyond Japan (although Shoei Imamura's "The Eel," an even more mysterious and elegant work in a similar vein, is a good starting point).

In this sense, "Eureka" belongs on a list with Canadian director Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" (and many of his other films), French director Bruno Dumont's extraordinary "The Life of Jesus" and "L'Humanité," Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's "The Wind Will Carry Us" and almost anything by Senegal's Ousmane Sembène, the founding father of African cinema. "Eureka" even belongs, to stretch the point a little, with some of the wealth of new films from the Chinese-speaking world, like Edward Yang's masterpiece "Yi Yi" or Zhang Yimou's "Not One Less." (Anybody who tries to tell you that world cinema outside the grasp of the Hollywood empire is weak right now hasn't been paying attention.)

All that said, "Eureka" presents a challenge to the viewer, and its American audience is likely to be even smaller than those for the movies listed above (not counting Sembène, who has never had a film in general U.S. release). This is a movie about a bus kidnapping, in which the crime occurs in the first few minutes, mostly off-screen, and the rest of the film consists entirely of the aftermath. Not to mention that it's in black and white, made by a Japanese director you've never heard of and mostly set either in a trashed suburban house or on a bus trip to nowhere whose passengers are variously depressed, psychotic, dying or searching for something they're unlikely to find. And did I point out that you're going to be in your seat for almost four hours?

Still, you can believe -- as I do -- that Aoyama could have shortened his film by up to an hour without sacrificing anything important and still respect the fact that he is clearly obeying his own instincts, his own sense of rhythm. He wants you to live with emotionally shattered bus driver Makoto (Koji Yakusho, who also played the enigmatic hero of "The Eel") and the motley, de facto family group he assembles around him. We watch them fall asleep in front of the TV set and conduct one-sided arguments about octopus dumplings. We learn how thorough Makoto is in washing wet cement off trowels and shovels, and how Japanese bus drivers navigate that country's narrow roadways in reverse gear (with the aid of tiny video cameras on the back of the bus). In the always-controversial task of making the movies seem like life, Aoyama has succeeded brilliantly; like life, his movie will still be here if you doze off or sneak out for coffee or a bathroom break.

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