Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims

Here’s a question for you. What do the hit comedy-dramas Ping Pong, Go and Zebraman all have in common? The answer is that they were all penned by prodigious scriptwriter, Kankuro Kudo. For five years now Kudo has been writing successful comedies for both film and TV, earning him a reputation as one of the best in the business, but in April 2005 he finally added directing to his list of talents when he decided to adapt Manga writer Kotobuki Shiriagari’s surreal Manga Serial Yaji & Kita for the big screen. Shiriagari’s work was in fact based on a 1958 film called Yaji and Kita On the Road, which saw a Samurai duo join a religious pilgrimage to Ise Temple in order to get some peace and rest from their nagging wives. By all accounts it was a fairly conventional comedy, which is certainly the last thing that can be said about Kankuro’s movie.


You see, Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is a musical. About two gay men: Yaji, a kind-hearted boor racked with guilt over dumping his wife and Kita, a failed actor and hopeless junkie suffering from bizarre acid flashbacks. The monochrome opening shows them living in squalor in a tiny hut down one of Edo’s dank side-alleys. Yaji is at his wits end trying to get Kita off the drugs when he spots a letter among the huge pile of bills that await his downtrodden lover. In there is an invitation to Ise Temple that boldly announces that “REALITY IS OUT THERE”, which Yaji immediately takes as a good omen that Ise Temple can help cure Kita of his drug problems. So the two decide it’s time to leave their depressing Edo lives behind and hit the Tokkaido highway to travel all the way across Japan into Ise, where a new reality awaits. What happens next is a Wizard of Oz style explosion of colour as Yaji & Kita celebrate the start of their journey with a sweeping song and dance number which loudly proclaims that they’re “BORN TO BE GAY” (not quite as cool as being WILD, but hey at least it’s a start). Jumping on a Harley Davidson motorcycle (don’t ask), they speed down the modern-day Tokkaido highway until a Highway Patrolman pulls them over and informs them that men from the Edo Era are only allowed to travel this road by foot, so it’s right back to the start before their journey (by foot of course) can finally begin!

What follows is a trippy, transcendental journey through time, space and Japanese pop culture unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed before. The sheer giddy madness of Yaji & Kita is perhaps crudely summed up by taking the humour of Monty Python, the junked up surrealism of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and cerebral twisting of Being John Malkovich, then throw in song and dance routines not unlike those in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Kankuro Kudo’s film doesn’t so much bend film genres as smash right through them like a 10-Ton sledgehammer. The first thing that’s dropped is any kind of plot. Yaji & Kita are heading to Ise to ease their woes and that’s all we need to know, instead their journey is split into five episodes which each pose fresh incidental problems for our hapless duo to face. Rather cleverly, each episode takes an anachronistic look at subsections of contemporary Japanese pop culture through the Jidai-Geki setting of the Edo Era.


In the first episode, entitled LAUGH INN the duo arrive in a town where the local currency is humour rather than money. If you want a good room at the local inn you better be able to make them cry with laughter, otherwise you’ll either be kicked out on the street or shunted into a dorm bed. Although neither of them are born comedians, Kita’s inappropriate hallucinations end up providing a healthy source of unintended amusement for the locals, that is until they end up having to perform a special comedy act for a humourless demonic gatekeeper who has sole control over who gets to move on to the next town or not. In Episode two: PLEASURE INN, Kita bumps into a gaggle of teenage schoolgirls who have been informed on the “BBS” that an ultra-cool gangster named Jiro is on his way to Edo. They’re in need of a hunky idol to worship and figure this Jiro is just the man. As soon as they bump into Yaji, however, they start idolising him instead, something that escalates to comedic levels when they bump into the real Jiro and he turns out to be a camp old man. Episode 3: SINGING INN is all about the power of song, or the lack of it in the case of Oyuki, a lovely young woman who unfortunately is the only person in her village who has a singing voice that could curdle milk. Her problems are made worse by her Frank-N-Furter-a-like father, an all singing and dancing drag queen running a successful teahouse where punters come to drink, relax, and be subjected to his latest act. In the process of teaching young Oyuki how to sing, Yaji and Kita end up recording a pop-ballad duet that ends up selling out at “Tower Phonographs” and shoots them to the top of the national charts! The final two episodes: KING’S INN and SOUL’S INN feature a Yam juice excreting King Arthur wannabe and a bathhouse full of wandering spirits who all have the exact same flabby man-breasted appearance. To reveal anymore about these two would be venturing too far into spoiler territory.

It’s hard to put into words just how surreal and how laugh-out-loud funny Yaji & Kita is, with this directorial debut Kankuro Kudo has demonstrated a seemingly effortless ability to combine slapstick with the surreal and mix it all up in a frantic, stylish way. His visual sense is already very assured, but more impressively is how he manages to traverse the changes in tone from comedic insanity to rather downbeat drama that occur when we get brief flashbacks into Yaji and Kita’s unhappy history. Said flashbacks might interrupt the flow of belly laughs, but they subtly flesh out the protagonists and keeps their motivations believable when little else about the film seems even remotely so. Kudo also deserves extra credit for gathering together a first rate cast of comic performers, many of whom actually have very little experience when it comes to the world of feature films. Shichinosuke Nakamura (Kita) is a talented young actor who cut his teeth on the Kabuki stage before making a move into cinema, to date his highest profile role has been as the encumbered young Emperor in The Last Samurai. In contrast Tomoya Nagase (Yaji) found fame as the frontman in the successful boygroup Tokio before moving into TV Jdoramas and winning new fans in successful comedies like Muko Dono! (My Husband). Both characters work well together in the title roles, Nakamura plays it completely straight as Kita because he understands that Kita is ultimately a tragic figure, having suffered certain torments as a child that have sapped his self-esteem and confidence to the point that he desperately tries to escape the reality around him. The character isn’t funny, his addiction isn’t funny, but his drug-fuelled imagination is, providing most of the humour in the film. Nakamura comfortably plays the tripped out observer to these hallucinations, allowing Tomoya to put in a very broad and physical comedic performance in the role of Yaji. This is something the young gangly actor is very good at, contorting his pin-up looks into numerous exacerbated expressions throughout.


Although the two lead actors are excellent in their respective roles, the funniest performance in the film comes from Sadawo Abe as Kin-Kin, the homophobic police inspector who is chasing after Yaji & Kita in relation to a murder case. With his diminutive stature, gold plated teeth, tattoos, bling Abe is gut-wrenchingly hilarious as the rather seedy “manhunter”. Almost all the other supporting roles amount to little more than cameos, but what memeroable cameos they are! Tomomitsu Yamaguchi, a stocky actor who usually plays hardmen puts in a brilliant turn as Oyuki’s drag-queen father; his song and dance number is one of the funniest scenes in the film. Yoshiyoshi Arakawa makes the most of his gawkish physicality playing hundreds of dead souls in a memorably surreal sequence and Otaku in Love (Koi no Mon) director Suzuki Matsuo appears as the Bearded Courtesan in a music video that had me in tears. Last but not least are the numerous star cameos from the likes of ARATA, Aso Kumiko, Kankuro Nakamura (father of Shichinosuke), Susumu Terajima, Kankuro Kudo, and Riki Takeuchi, who almost gives himself a stroke through excessive gurning as the big nasty gatekeeper.

Apparently US film distributors Media Blasters have picked up the American rights to Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims and intend to give it a widespread theatrical release in 2006. The gay protagonists, distinct lack of plot and episodic structure will probably put most cinemagoers off, but I hope the film becomes a minor hit when it finally hits Western screens because it’s been a long time since I laughed so long and as hard as I did whilst watching this bizarre adventure.

Presentation

Asmik Ace have decided to grace Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims with two separate DVD releases. There’s the Standard Edition, from which this review is taken and the fancily packaged 2-disc Special Edition, which has an extra disc housing a making-of featurette, deleted scenes, film premier footage, Tanuki/Zazen Boys music video, storyboards, photo gallery, and a documentary.

Presented anamorphically at a slightly snipped 1.74:1 aspect ratio, Yaji & Kita’s crisp and unblemished print looks every bit as good on DVD as you’d expect form such a new film. The colour scheme is rich and vibrant, contrast and brightness levels are all excellent and compression niggles are extremely minor. My only bugbear is the amount of Edge Enhancement on display, there really shouldn’t be any on a film this new.

Japanese DD5.1 or Japanese DTS are your audio options for this feature, both of which sound almost identical. They’re very loud tracks with excellent dynamics; clear, audible dialogue; and deep, muscular bass. If pressed to choose between them I’d have to say that the bass on the DTS track is just a little bit tighter, despite the fact it is only a clipped down 768 Kbps track.

Optional English subtitles are included, with no spelling or grammatical errors that I can recall.

Extras

It goes without saying that the extra features on this disc come without English subs, so I have decided to leave the score for this section of the review blank in the little chart on the right, as it wouldn’t be fair to rate supplements that I can never fully understand. Despite a healthy number of options in the DVD’s main menu there are only a handful of extra features on the disc. These are: two Teaser Trailers, one Theatrical Trailer and one TV Spot - all presented in anamorphic widescreen, except for the non-anamorphic TV spot. The only substantial extra feature on the disc is an Audio Commentary with Director Kankuro Kudo and the stars: Tomoya Nagase & Shichinosuke Nakamura. For the benefit of the this review I sat and skimmed through this commentary, desperately wishing that I could actually understand more than the odd random word, as it sounds like an amusing, fun track. One thing I did note though is that various supporting actors drop in and out of the studio to sit and talk with the others at various stages in the film.

Overall

Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is that rare thing, an Asian film that draws upon famous Western influences to produce something that is both totally off the wall and completely unique. It is not a film that will please everyone, but if you’re open to something truly bizarre and surreal then you will be rewarded with a rich comic experience. As usual for a r2j release there are no subtitles on any of the extras, but also as usual the audio & video more than makes up for this oversight.

Sponsored Review