Bright Future

What does it take to make people change something in their future? This is one of the underlying questions in Kurosawa Kyoshi’s occasionally dreamlike Bright Future, with which he first made it into the competition at Cannes. Now renowned for his dark, alarming horror pics about bizarre events that can penetrate everyday life at any moment, in Bright Future he makes the tension more inconspicuous than in films shown previously in Rotterdam such as Cure or Pulse. Débutant Odagiri Jo, star Asano Tadanobu and Fuji Tatsuya, the protagonist from Oshima’s L’empire des sens, are stunning in their restrained roles -and in their beautiful futuristic rag clothes by Kitamura Michiko. Mamoru, a 27-year-old laundry worker, keeps a poisonous jellyfish in an aquarium with the utopian aim of allowing it to mutate into a fresh water creature. His apparently even more unbalanced colleague Yuji, who seems to have a quiet crush on him, is annoyed by the sinister suggestions of their boss. But it is Mamoru who commits the murder. After he is sentenced to death, Yuji starts to look after the jellyfish and becomes friends with Mamoru’s father, who has a shop selling secondhand techno things. Bright Future is difficult to label, but with its fascinating images and mysterious metaphors, this science-fiction melodrama shot on DV is an appeal for ‘minor revolutions’, and above all: visionary cinema.