by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: Uzumasa
ESCAPE DRAWS FROM interesting source material, in adapting the life of left-wing terrorist Satoshi Kirishima to film. However, the movie also remains trapped by genre conventions, and ultimately proves a middling work.
The real-world Satoshi Kirishima spent decades on the run after a series of bombings against Japanese corporations in the 1970s. Though Kirishima was just a student at the time, he was soon named to Japan’s most-wanted list, where he would remain for the next 40 years.
Kirishima died in January 2024 after turning up in a Kanagawa hospital with a terminal cancer diagnosis. As it transpired, Kirishima had not fled Japan, as was previously believed, but had in fact been working as a construction worker under the name Hiroshi Uchida. This is not unlike other cases, such as Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu’s arrest in 2000 in Osaka after more than 30 years as a fugitive abroad.
Escape, then, seeks to delve into Kirishima’s many years in hiding. Kirishima is depicted as a reluctant hero—someone with strong ideals for justice, who disavows violence even if he struggles with the guilt of his actions having accidentally led to deaths.
Photo courtesy of Uzumasa
Hiding from the police proves surprisingly easy for Kirishima, who simply shaves his head and enters temporary construction work under an assumed name. The movie seeks to detail his internal struggle, in that Kirishima finds himself isolated for years on end, and is unable to form close attachments to others because of the need to hide his identity.
The movie is divided into several sections. The first focuses on Kirishima’s youth, with the next his middle-age. Finally, the film depicts Kirishima on his deathbed.
This extended tracing of life attempts to highlight Kirishima’s subjectivity through the course of his long isolation, and his “escape” through the course of four decades. At times, the movie tries something more experimental, with dialogue between different versions of Kirishima. The film also depicts Kirishima as eventually seeking solace in Buddhism, but struggling to reconcile Buddhist attitudes of renouncing the world with his left-wing ideals to change the world for the better.
Escape further tries to evoke the changing of the times, in highlighting Kirishima’s experience of major political events in Japan since the 1970s. Nevertheless, Escape is not so successful at integrating the larger span of Japanese history with its narrative, and the effect comes off as jumpy and choppy.
If Escape is adapted from an interesting story, the final product is ultimately middling, probably because it cannot draw enough interesting details from Kirishima’s life in hiding to carry the narrative. As a result, the movie instead moves in the direction of abstruse symbolism, which does not always work.
This is to be contrasted with, say, Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, which uses one event in the history of the United Red Army to great effect in capturing the dynamics and contradictions of left-wing activism in a single episode. Though still noteworthy to those interested in the often violent history of Japanese leftism in the 1970s, in this light, Escape is not a masterwork.