Nazo no tenkousei (1998)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

Kazuya Konaka

Writers:

Taku Mayumura (novel)
Sadayuki Murai (screenplay)

Plot Keywords:

Based On Novel

Cast

Masami Horiuchi	...	Kishibe The Scientist
Dai Kanai	...	Old man
Chiharu Niiyama	...	Midori Kagawa
Ken Nishida	...	Dr, Konoike
Yasue Satô	...	Mayumi Iwase
Satoshi Tsumabuki	...	Koichi Iwata

Also Known As:

The Dimension Travelers (USA) (DVD title)

Runtime:

USA:95 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Colour:

Colour

Company:

Bandai Visual Company

Map Page, Doll Play, Pasage 13

Old news, especially about sci-fi, but starts better than it ends. First half, where all is implied, promises more than the rest delivers. It's much easier to touch an audience's experience when implying, no matter how far out may be what you're implying, than when trying to show. (Compare best superhero movie ever, "Unbreakable," with baseball bat swinging "Signs.") I'm not sure "Dimension Travelers" ever passes the height it attains when Miyami (Yasue Sato) explains Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. At that point I hoped it might become, despite the school girl setting, a SCIENCE-fi film.

Touchpoints? "Le Jetée" (but not "12 Monkeys"). Various Phillip K. Dick. "Turn" (one of my more long-winded IMDb comments). "Fushigi Yugi." "Dr. Who."

Miyami's long, rather horse-like face, besides making her an excellent mystery figure in the early going, slightly suggests Gwyneth Paltrow. Note, also, Miyami claims to be Eurasian. But I see these things all over the place: a black and a filipino at work, each, if differently, looking like my Sicilian father.

There's a still up, no longer open-to-submissions, site documenting the portrayal of libraries in film. The list has no Japanese entries, but this is at least the third J-film I've seen lately that would have qualified. The other two are "Love Letter" and "Whisper of the Heart."

Liked a lot, and this is in the second half of the film, the scale model school Midori constructs in the mental hospital. Kind of like turning unexpectedly to a map page in a novel. But at the same time, making models, especially of a unique entity like one's own school, exhibits some of the weirdness, the slight perversity of doll play. Think also of the city model in Paul Auster's "Music of Chance."

The castle's "interior" at the end of passage 13 may be key to what the film is up to. Or maybe not. The director hardly explores it. Did he know what he had?