1999 is often discussed as a great year in cinema, and key to that is because it was 1999. All the celebrated and successful films of that year tend to share themes about the destruction of the old, the beginning of the new. Or are vibrating on end of the century, millennium anxieties – fear of a Y2K apocalypse, etc.
And in this year, the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, Charisma (1999), is released. All I knew of Charisma was that it reunited Kurosawa with one of his favourite leading men, Koji Yakusho, after Cure and like in Cure, Yakusho plays a trench-coated cop, and but unlike Cure, this one’s about a tree. And the film is an oddity in Kurosawa’s career- not a horror movie really, but a strange and surreal allegory.
After a hostage situation goes wrong, detective Yabuike (Yakusho) is ordered to go on holiday for a week. He winds up in a forrest out in the countryside, and as he wanders through, he meets people who live around the area. Eventually he finds a tree out in a field by itself within a clearing and is told that the tree is called “Charisma.” There’s nothing necessarily special about it on first glance, aside from the steel pipe scaffolding around it. But to the makeshift community around the area Charisma represents different values, and eventually there is conflict and competition around it. And the film’s journey is Yabuike understanding what it means to him.
While Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata was in dialogue with films by Ozu, Charisma feels in communication with Tarkovsky. Using depth of field and distant shots locating figures in a landscape, there’s a sense of nature comparable to Mirror or The Sacrifice; the forrest itself feels akin to The Zone in Stalker, a strange alien space. Charisma doesn’t feel like slow cinema and often clips along elliptically, leaving you to understand a quick scene only afterwards in the narrative flow. Unlike the unsettling power Kurosawa can render in an empty urban environment in his other films, I wasn’t disturbed here, but more intrigued by the confusion and the growing chaos that builds like a fog. Moments of violence have impact by how they unfold slowly like a dream and from a distance.
Charisma is a weird movie and the metaphorical ecological mystery zone ensures that its ponderous themes have an impact now. I feel like there’s a clarity of purpose here, particularly when Yabuike shifts as a character from a passive figure stumbling through the woods to a sense of understanding. As an end of century movie, Charisma is about resolve, not resolution, and how the individual operates within an environment. Watched a copy uploaded onto YouTube. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 