Review: Immortal Hero...and back to Happy Science World
My elicit affair with the weird and wonderful folk of Happy Science continues. It's last Sunday and I have been lured to an old haunt, the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square, with the promise of a free ticket to the London premier of Immortal Hero, the new religion's latest cinematic effort to spread enlightenment across the globe.
There is a gaggle of HS members bearing the usual literature and membership forms - the first time I've seen a number of them 'on active service'. I tell one young fellow that I am looking for Hiro, and that I already have a free ticket booked. "Yay!" he says.
The closest that Happy Science will get to China.
Hiro locates me and quickly ushers me in, as - true to form - I'm cutting it fine. I move quickly but not too quickly to be hit by a wave of nostalgia: the instance of entering the PCC ready to enjoy a movie I fully expect to be awful is too redolent of screenings of The Room to escape mention. (yes, I went three times. And on the last high-fived Tommy Wiseau and later fluffed a football pass at him on the front courtyard. Hardcore).
From what I can tell from the darkened, perhaps a quarter-filled auditorium, the demographic is reassuringly vanilla, much as with the notorious Margaret Thatcher Spiritual Message. I sit next to a couple of middle-aged girlfriends who've even gone to the luxury of popcorn. The only audience member who definitely hasn't wandered in looking for Military Wives is a 20-something white chap with sandy-brown braids and is currently amusing his girlfriend by resting his Doc Martined feet on the empty seats in front of him. So Vice have turned up, after all.
The screening begins with the obligatory 'informational' broadcast from Happy Science, homing in on peace, love and Master Okawa. It explains that the fictional account we are about to see is based on a near-death - or rather in effect, actual death - experience of Okawa himself, surviving something called a "myocardial infarction" (turns out it's a heart attack). "Stop with the spoilers!" shouts the gentleman from (for my purposes) Vice. Turns out he's a graduate of Wiseau School of Screen-Heckling. I wonder if he's packed his own spoons out of habit.
The film begins. We are introduced to Makoto Mioya (Hisaaki Takeushi), a successful self-help author with a Stakhanovite work ethic (who, to all intents and purposes, is Ryuho Okawa). Egged on by a spiritual apparition of (as far as I'm concerned) G.K. Chesterton, he puts finishing his book before spending time with his family, and his own health. What appears to be a bad migraine quickly escalates into a collapse in a park, a miraculous survival and resulting epiphany that he is called to spread healing by the power of the mind and spirit. "All the illnesses are can be cured by keeping a bright and positive mindset. It's possible to heal yourself." he later tells a receptive crowd. (SO...Happy Science advocate spiritual healing...how did I miss this? Oh yeah, I was probably distracted by the channelling spirits of dead leaders thing. And the channelling of alive leaders thing. And the alternately sound-and-terrifying right-wing politics thing)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. My first surprise is that the film is in English. If nothing else, I'd been ready to bask in the pool of sophistication that comes with watching a Japanese language film. Or at least paddle in the puddle. "They've filmed it in English to suit the global market", I tell myself. "Fair enough." But something still isn't right. With horror I realise that the actors' lips are not synching with their speech and thus the film I have sat down to see is in fact... dubbed. Rejecting dubbed films is a rare chance for we uncouth Anglos to take the cultural high ground, even while we expect to hear our language reproduced faithfully across the eateries, markets and museums of the outside world. I myself will only embrace it in Asterix features, which in this writer's eyes can neither be spoilt nor improved upon.
But we are where we are. Apart from some of the translation being a mile off (a hospitalised Mioya tells his children "Your papa has been through many hardships up to now in my life."), it doesn't bother after a while. The real problem where text and delivery is concerned is the unrelenting earnestness with which almost all the central characters voice their thoughts. We first encounter Mioya's wife Isoko (Tamao Sato) as a devoted, giggling fangirl, meeting Mioya due to a mix-up at the dating agency. It's a fairly entertaining performance from both actress and voice actress (Jennie Kwan) in the archetypal vein of Overly Attached Girlfriend. The major implausibility is that the prodigious student of human behaviour Mioya issues a proposal and not a restraining order.
The Mioyas' preteen daughter, Tamami (Kei Kinoshita), seems to have inherited her mother's starry-eyed enthusiasm for all things Makato, but gets away with it by being cute-as-the-Higuchi, a quality in which she is only bested by her younger brother, Tsuruo (Takafumi Suto). Mioya himself is brooding and self-lacerating before his transformation, and looks ever on the verge of ascending unto the nearest cloud afterwards. The only family member who cuts through the saccharine sincerity is elder son Eiichi (Shio Abe), a cocky teenager who slacks off visiting time to go and practice basketball, is as unimpressed with his father's miraculous recovery and enlightenment as a teen might be with a father's Airfix models or AC/DC posters.
Sympathy with the protagonist under these circumstances is challenging at best. Mioya looks little Tsuruo - suffering from bullying at school - in the eye and promises him that daddy is ready to "die for the truth". It's hard to imagine that being great comfort to the wee'un. It's all too much for my appointed representative from Vice: "Sorry, 'scuse me. Can't watch this rubbish. Least I tried. Feel sorry for those who actually paid for it," is his review as he clambers out. (That said, it strikes me that, unlike the Thatcher gig, the vast majority of the audience do not walk out.)
I don't know enough about film to put my finger on why this all is. What is it about film in the service of religion, or some other belief system, that is so often so unsatisfying? I turn to the review on the film analysis YouTube channel Inside My Mind for help:
One charge laid at the Pure Flix' door by IMM that can't be applied to Immortal Hero however is the way it divides people into good believers and bad atheists. The second major plot pivot takes place in London, which, on the eve of Mioya's international launch, is hit by a terrorist attack. Through this device, the audience is introduced to the interfaith character of the Happy Science message, as Mioya is propelled to decrying the monopoly on truth claimed by Christianity and Islam. For all its faults then, Immortal Hero does not carry the Manichean crudeness of God's Not Dead, which pits a two-dimensional heroic square-jawed Christian student against a two-dimensional tyrannical flame-bearded atheist professor. While I balk at Immortal Hero's copout in identifying the likely perpetrator of the atrocity, calling it "an extremist anti-Christian group" (making me, I hope for the briefest of moments, further to the right than a movement that denies genocide*), that decision was presumably made in that spirit of interreligious reconciliation. As a Christian, I am not much closer to finding a compelling answer to the problem of Christian universalism than I was the last time I wistfully compared it to the laissez-faire approach of Happy Science, and the Eastern traditions from which it emerged.
Because even if a film is subpar, has clunky dubbed dialogue and staggeringly corny original lyrics to its soundtrack, it can still - in places - be a positive advert for the worldview behind it. For me there is no greater example of this than the few seconds in which Ryuho Okawa - the real thing - makes an amusing cameo, walking down a Tokyo street past his actor-avatar. Just as I couldn't quite see a group that cheerily admits to not having many worshippers at its London temple, I can't fully write off Master Okawa as the leader of a brain-washing cult. Cult leaders don't tend to have a sense of humour (he writes in the film's accompanying volume, The New Resurrection, that he'd have liked the scriptwriters to include his struggles with a catheter "as a joke").
And a new look.
But honestly if more, less weird people than me are going to take them seriously, they will need better films. Or none at all.
*In fairness, being almost entirely ignorant of East Asian history, I said I would look into the validity of the claims on the Nanking massacre. Which I haven't. But I will.
There is a gaggle of HS members bearing the usual literature and membership forms - the first time I've seen a number of them 'on active service'. I tell one young fellow that I am looking for Hiro, and that I already have a free ticket booked. "Yay!" he says.
Hiro locates me and quickly ushers me in, as - true to form - I'm cutting it fine. I move quickly but not too quickly to be hit by a wave of nostalgia: the instance of entering the PCC ready to enjoy a movie I fully expect to be awful is too redolent of screenings of The Room to escape mention. (yes, I went three times. And on the last high-fived Tommy Wiseau and later fluffed a football pass at him on the front courtyard. Hardcore).
From what I can tell from the darkened, perhaps a quarter-filled auditorium, the demographic is reassuringly vanilla, much as with the notorious Margaret Thatcher Spiritual Message. I sit next to a couple of middle-aged girlfriends who've even gone to the luxury of popcorn. The only audience member who definitely hasn't wandered in looking for Military Wives is a 20-something white chap with sandy-brown braids and is currently amusing his girlfriend by resting his Doc Martined feet on the empty seats in front of him. So Vice have turned up, after all.
The screening begins with the obligatory 'informational' broadcast from Happy Science, homing in on peace, love and Master Okawa. It explains that the fictional account we are about to see is based on a near-death - or rather in effect, actual death - experience of Okawa himself, surviving something called a "myocardial infarction" (turns out it's a heart attack). "Stop with the spoilers!" shouts the gentleman from (for my purposes) Vice. Turns out he's a graduate of Wiseau School of Screen-Heckling. I wonder if he's packed his own spoons out of habit.
The film begins. We are introduced to Makoto Mioya (Hisaaki Takeushi), a successful self-help author with a Stakhanovite work ethic (who, to all intents and purposes, is Ryuho Okawa). Egged on by a spiritual apparition of (as far as I'm concerned) G.K. Chesterton, he puts finishing his book before spending time with his family, and his own health. What appears to be a bad migraine quickly escalates into a collapse in a park, a miraculous survival and resulting epiphany that he is called to spread healing by the power of the mind and spirit. "All the illnesses are can be cured by keeping a bright and positive mindset. It's possible to heal yourself." he later tells a receptive crowd. (SO...Happy Science advocate spiritual healing...how did I miss this? Oh yeah, I was probably distracted by the channelling spirits of dead leaders thing. And the channelling of alive leaders thing. And the alternately sound-and-terrifying right-wing politics thing)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. My first surprise is that the film is in English. If nothing else, I'd been ready to bask in the pool of sophistication that comes with watching a Japanese language film. Or at least paddle in the puddle. "They've filmed it in English to suit the global market", I tell myself. "Fair enough." But something still isn't right. With horror I realise that the actors' lips are not synching with their speech and thus the film I have sat down to see is in fact... dubbed. Rejecting dubbed films is a rare chance for we uncouth Anglos to take the cultural high ground, even while we expect to hear our language reproduced faithfully across the eateries, markets and museums of the outside world. I myself will only embrace it in Asterix features, which in this writer's eyes can neither be spoilt nor improved upon.
But we are where we are. Apart from some of the translation being a mile off (a hospitalised Mioya tells his children "Your papa has been through many hardships up to now in my life."), it doesn't bother after a while. The real problem where text and delivery is concerned is the unrelenting earnestness with which almost all the central characters voice their thoughts. We first encounter Mioya's wife Isoko (Tamao Sato) as a devoted, giggling fangirl, meeting Mioya due to a mix-up at the dating agency. It's a fairly entertaining performance from both actress and voice actress (Jennie Kwan) in the archetypal vein of Overly Attached Girlfriend. The major implausibility is that the prodigious student of human behaviour Mioya issues a proposal and not a restraining order.
I've read all your emails. I mean books. And your emails.
The Mioyas' preteen daughter, Tamami (Kei Kinoshita), seems to have inherited her mother's starry-eyed enthusiasm for all things Makato, but gets away with it by being cute-as-the-Higuchi, a quality in which she is only bested by her younger brother, Tsuruo (Takafumi Suto). Mioya himself is brooding and self-lacerating before his transformation, and looks ever on the verge of ascending unto the nearest cloud afterwards. The only family member who cuts through the saccharine sincerity is elder son Eiichi (Shio Abe), a cocky teenager who slacks off visiting time to go and practice basketball, is as unimpressed with his father's miraculous recovery and enlightenment as a teen might be with a father's Airfix models or AC/DC posters.
Sympathy with the protagonist under these circumstances is challenging at best. Mioya looks little Tsuruo - suffering from bullying at school - in the eye and promises him that daddy is ready to "die for the truth". It's hard to imagine that being great comfort to the wee'un. It's all too much for my appointed representative from Vice: "Sorry, 'scuse me. Can't watch this rubbish. Least I tried. Feel sorry for those who actually paid for it," is his review as he clambers out. (That said, it strikes me that, unlike the Thatcher gig, the vast majority of the audience do not walk out.)
I don't know enough about film to put my finger on why this all is. What is it about film in the service of religion, or some other belief system, that is so often so unsatisfying? I turn to the review on the film analysis YouTube channel Inside My Mind for help:
"This movie just loses focus on its story because it's trying so hard to get its propaganda out...the film's characters are just flat and uninteresting stereotypes that don't work...they're flat, they're boring and they're just there for the sermon to be preached...the cinematography is awful...The film's camera work is very uninteresting, no inspiration behind it whatsoever"
OK, you got me (or didn't). It's actually IMM's review of God's Not Dead, the landmark Christian agitprop from PureFlix. But he could be talking about a great many religious films (indeed the video is a general critique of Christian films, with GND as its patron piñata).
I'm far from an expert on camerawork but I can recall only very few memorable shots from Immortal Hero. There is a shot of a recovered Mioya pacing in a hotel room, which about sums up the film: a lot of the time it feels like it's going nowhere. The exceptions are those that appear to convey the feeling behind the film, or more precisely its worldview. A shot of cherry blossom on the heels of a flashback scene of a young Mioya engaging in seiza and study with his beloved parents shares an inimitable flavour of 'Japanese-ness', and the decision to have him dropping a Japanese-language edition of Tolstoy's Resurrection as his blood fails his heart is a nice nod toward the spiritual resurrection awaiting him. If ideological filmmakers expended the same levels of imagination on the entire product and not just the opportunities to transmit their moral raisons d'etre they might be getting somewhere.
One charge laid at the Pure Flix' door by IMM that can't be applied to Immortal Hero however is the way it divides people into good believers and bad atheists. The second major plot pivot takes place in London, which, on the eve of Mioya's international launch, is hit by a terrorist attack. Through this device, the audience is introduced to the interfaith character of the Happy Science message, as Mioya is propelled to decrying the monopoly on truth claimed by Christianity and Islam. For all its faults then, Immortal Hero does not carry the Manichean crudeness of God's Not Dead, which pits a two-dimensional heroic square-jawed Christian student against a two-dimensional tyrannical flame-bearded atheist professor. While I balk at Immortal Hero's copout in identifying the likely perpetrator of the atrocity, calling it "an extremist anti-Christian group" (making me, I hope for the briefest of moments, further to the right than a movement that denies genocide*), that decision was presumably made in that spirit of interreligious reconciliation. As a Christian, I am not much closer to finding a compelling answer to the problem of Christian universalism than I was the last time I wistfully compared it to the laissez-faire approach of Happy Science, and the Eastern traditions from which it emerged.
Because even if a film is subpar, has clunky dubbed dialogue and staggeringly corny original lyrics to its soundtrack, it can still - in places - be a positive advert for the worldview behind it. For me there is no greater example of this than the few seconds in which Ryuho Okawa - the real thing - makes an amusing cameo, walking down a Tokyo street past his actor-avatar. Just as I couldn't quite see a group that cheerily admits to not having many worshippers at its London temple, I can't fully write off Master Okawa as the leader of a brain-washing cult. Cult leaders don't tend to have a sense of humour (he writes in the film's accompanying volume, The New Resurrection, that he'd have liked the scriptwriters to include his struggles with a catheter "as a joke").
But honestly if more, less weird people than me are going to take them seriously, they will need better films. Or none at all.
*In fairness, being almost entirely ignorant of East Asian history, I said I would look into the validity of the claims on the Nanking massacre. Which I haven't. But I will.
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