This baffling and meandering film by Gakuryu Ishii starts under a steel bridge in downtown Tokyo. In high contrast black and white, like the street photography of Daiydo Moriyama, we’re thrust into broken furniture and an umbrella stand. People are living here semi-permanently at least. A big cardboard box suddenly rights itself, and we’re confronted head-on with an infinitely dark rectangular hole, a 16:9 shaped peephole on the world.
From inside the box we get a blurry view of passing pedestrians, and a deep voice relates the philosophy of the. This is no society-discarded homeless person but someone who has made a deliberate decision. The voice declares its own superiority to those it sees who are merely blinded by fake reality while he has “abandoned all that is fake to obtain the real thing”. What in fact the Box Man is and whether there’s anything more than just a literal cardboard box to what acts as shelter, armour, makeshift film lab and portal , remains an enigma until very end.
The film premiered at Berlinale in 2024 after having taken twenty-seven years to reach completion. Based on the 1973 novel of same name by playwright/novelist Kobo Abe; director Gakuryu Ishii got Abe’s blessing for adaptation back in 1990s. Work began on first attempt to make movie in Hamburg Germany 1997 before being abandoned surprisingly few original cast members still remain including regular Ishii collaborators such as Masatoshi Nagase (Myself) Tadanobu Asano (Fake Doctor).
Visually & musically this is one of extremes tonally mirroring Ishii’s own back catalogue which stretches from mediative August in the Water (1995) through punk film Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001). Switching from b&w to colour, industrial rock ambient music the movie goes from anarchistic to quietly contemplative. Cardboard box-wearing characters face painted warriors square off in skilfully choreographed scenes that remind me of mad eccentrics in Shuji Terayama’s films Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) Grass Labyrinth (1979). Ishii’s background as member of experimental noise band MACH-1.67 is reflected by way Tokyo is depicted as buzzing electric city where his characters inhabit a parallel universe like surreal on top real Tokyo.
Yoko (also known as Fake Nurse) is the only significant woman in a story about men’s obsessions with women’s bodies. But she isn’t just a typical helpless female character.In the movie, I am a professional photographer who spends most of my time dressed up as the Box Man. Near the end of the film, Yoko offers me an opportunity to “get out” of the box, and for a second it seems like we might have some kind of real relationship. But instead I say no and start putting more boxes over all the windows in the building where we are, effectively turning it into an even bigger box. Then Yoko goes out the back door.
In its last scene, The Box Man throws us all into a collective state of peeping out onto reality through our own narrow theater screen slit. We sit in our seats for a few minutes while Ishii leaves us alone with ourselves and each other in the darkened cinema. It’s not hard to see how this could be taken as a general statement on modern life in increasingly individualistic societies that risk becoming communities composed entirely of people who don’t know how to communicate with one another anymore; or why such a stylish piece from Japan about an alternate reality living beside our own might attract similar levels of attention as last year’s Parasite.
But this is also just a movie that says something deeply unsettling about human beings’ capacity to want what they shouldn’t especially when those things are cloistered within our own minds or rooms or neighborhoods and always mediated by screens: computer screens; phone screens; television screens; movie screens; et cetera, et cetera. As Ishii himself put it recently during an interview: “We’re all box men now.”
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