The Box Man

Third Window have released a number of  Gakuryu (previously Sogo) Ishii films over the last several years, and this particular feature, The Box Man, an adaptation of a novel by Kobo Abe (Woman of the Dunes) appears to have been a long gestating labour of love, and also brings back together the stars of Ishii’s earlier Electric Dragon 80,000v: Masatoshi Nagase and Tadanobu Asano. 

A photographer only known as Myself (Masatoshi Nagase) obsesses over the Box Man, who he follows and then seeks to become. Taking the box for himself, this new Box Man finds himself enmeshed in the ploys of a Fake Doctor (Tadanobu Asano), a struck-off doctor, the General (Koichi Sato), and Yoko (Ayana Shiramoto), a nurse. 

Leave almost all expectations at the door and don’t try too hard to work out exactly what’s going on, as that way lies madness. The Box Man is something of a mood film, starting in stark black and white, with a pounding, percussive and bass soundtrack with a deep voice-over that is effective in drawing you into the feel of the film, as well as setting up something of the Box Man being watched by Myself as once he was. Immediately, the use of the box, the strip through which the Box Man sees, sets up suggestions of voyeurism, for there is much obsession with the legs of women in short skirts, though this does have something of a cinematic point to it, and also a narrative one.  

From then the Box Man becomes drawn into the odd relationships that exist between the Fake Doctor, the General and Yoko (described at one point by the Fake Doctor as being his common-law wife). Their relationships take a while to become clear and even then some of it is relatively opaque: the General seems to need the Box Man for some personal suicide, of which the Fake Doctor is enmeshed and these parts of the narrative are hard to entirely decipher because this feels like a film that is likely hard to make, the story in the novel likely easier to describe through the inner-workings of its characters than in a film, where it's hard to entirely pin down just who, why and what. It’s to the film’s credit then that this is mainly unimportant and it has clarity enough that we understand that the Box Man is necessary to them and there are hints of these characters bearing some of the traits of Myself. As the film tells us repeatedly: those who obsess about the Box Man become the Box Man. But also as we see, the Box Man is struggling himself to truly be the Box Man. 

Baffled yet? 

And why not? I suspect The Box Man falls into that camp of Unfilmable Novels, and often those novels make the most fascinating films because of the nature of the attempt. Trying to assimilate a novel’s themes, characters and story into a different medium, and channeled through a director’s own vision can cause intriguing results. In this case it's realised in some wonderful aspects, Myself being a photographer, we see him within the box as a kind of darkroom, in microcosm viewing negatives and printing them; the area within the box becomes a true cinematic space, clearly larger than it can be based on what we see on screen, but nevertheless important as it is both home and identity of the Box Man, like a snail with its shell. How that box interacts with the world matters as much as the words that the Box Man writes in his diary and which seem to generate and confirm his identity, or not. 

Equally, there is a lovely strand of absurdism, two Box Men fighting, one shooting, one clubbing the other with a stuffed toy. Chasing up stairs, falling down them, it could be silly but it all works in a way because the world we enter is a small one, where everyone seems to make sense in it. Whether it's the Assassin trying to kill the Box Man, or the Badge-wearing Beggar (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) who chases him early on, throwing  rocks at him. The film creates its own world, an internal verisimilitude. For this reason the film resonates even if at times it leaves you wondering what the bloody hell is going on. This won’t be for everyone, because it is a mood piece, yet it’s two leads are both excellent performers, Asano especially, but in some ways it’s Ayana Shiramoto as Yoko (interestingly the only person with a name throughout), who is perhaps most important, because her quiet, underplaying somehow feels very necessary. I mean when two middle-aged men wearing boxes are duking it out, having someone serenely around them makes it seem more normal. 

It’s quite a dark film visually, but often beautiful, the images feel carefully composed and often riff on the slot that the Box Man sees the world through. Voyeurism sneaks into the story but also is apparent with how often people are viewed, seen, spied upon in various forms and formats. Sometimes images are displayed, overlaid, even if we don’t know their meaning.  

If I had a gripe with the film it's the same as any film of this length - it's either too long or too short. The Box Man is too long by about ten-minutes. Considering the narrative is, at best, relatively slight and so making this a film primarily of mood, style and tone (as well as performance),  it just manages to go on a bit too long. It can be hard to really sustain mood so that it enthralls for long periods and The Box Man does for most of the film, but it just needed a bit of trimming. I’d noticed the same with the film I’d watched the night before, The Devil by Andrzej Zulawski, which is in many ways similar, a film where the plot is really a secondary aspect.  

Nevertheless, if slightly overlong, the film at its best is surprisingly enthralling and wonderfully absurd - Asano and Nagase as our two leads both give performances that are skilled, but moreover, give a sense that they both had a whale of time making the film.  You can understand why too - there’s something anarchically absurd in The Box Man and that’s usually when it’s at its best.