‘Cloud’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Takes Aim At Social Media With A Good Old Fashioned Thriller — Venice Film Festival
Yoshii (Masaki Suda) sells stuff. Any stuff, as long as it’s piled high — in a digital sense — and selling cheap, but not nearly as cheap as what he paid for it. The first thing we see him buy is a pile of “miracle therapy machines” at a knockdown price casually extorted from the people who claim to make them. Who buys this garbage? Who cares? Yoshii is full of the bravado of a gambler on a winning streak. He has no idea whether he is buying fake designer goods, he tells another “reseller,” which is the name of his game. The point is to move things on before you find out.
Except that some people do find out they have been cheated. Among them, there are even people as web-smart as Yoshii himself. They will find out who he really is, behind his internet handle Ratel. And when they find out, they will be angry in the way that only anonymous enemies on the internet can be angry. Almost as angry as his former boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), who kept urging Yoshii to move into management at his vast dry-cleaning firm and whose feelings were very, very hurt when he refused. So hurt he felt humiliated. He’s watched enough movies — maybe even played enough games — to know what he has to do next. Revenge feels good. “Now I’m having fun,” he says as he prowls around Yoshii’s new house with a shotgun, “I’ve always dreamed of this!”
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A master of atmosphere in prize-winning films such as Wife of a Spy, Kiyoshi Kurosawa here grasps the thriller genre by the collar and gives it a good shake. Actually, Cloud manages to be many things — a social document about online communications and how radically they have reshaped the world; a snappy shoot-em-up; and a brooding moral tale, its warning of ultimate doom saved for a final line delivered against a lurid sunset that makes the canopy of sky look poisoned. No cracks show between these multiple facets, however, partly thanks to a brilliantly conceived production design dominated by mess.
There is barely room in Yoshii’s apartment for anything apart from boxes of goods in transit and the trailing cables attached to screens he checks constantly, seeing how his sales are going and whether the price is right. There certainly isn’t room for his girlfriend Akiko’s wardrobe. So he moves house, but the boxes come along with a pile of household goods and a wreckage of unwashed dishes that materialize as soon as Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) — a doll sugared with practiced cuteness — walks out the door in her lollipop-colored coat, saying she is bored.
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Outside that door, all the action takes place in warehouses, abandoned factories and, in one particularly decisive scene, a sewage farm; Tokyo in general seems to be strangled by its own engineering, while Yoshii is struggling to keep his head above his dubious merchandise even as the mob closes in on him. Kurosawa describes Yoshii as a villain, but he is certainly an ambivalent one: Masaka Suda has a sweetness about him, even when he is shooting an assailant point-blank, that convinces us against all the evidence that he never meant any harm. Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a local lad whom he employed to pack shelves but who proves to be handy in all kinds of circumstances, has a similarly innocent boyishness that sticks to him no matter how many small arms he produces from his backpack. They could be a couple of kids from a manga adventure.
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Cloud comes to the boil very slowly. We are halfway through the two-hour running time before the midnight bangs on the door and a smashed window let Yoshii know that his dream run making money from nothing is about to be derailed. It is a cleverly calculated pace, however, that draws us into this nether world of the retail industry so that we feel in sympathy with its lawlessness and have slipped along with Yoshii into a willing oblivion to the people robbed and scammed by deals that are, after all, not so different from any other kind of price gouging. When the boys start shooting like a couple of yakuza on a rampage — because when the simmering starts to bubble, Cloud turns out to be very much hard-boiled — we are already complicit.
Cloud is showing at a midnight screening at the Venice Film Festival, the slot where they show scary movies. It is its own brand of scary, but also a lot more complicated than that.
Title: Cloud
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masataka Kubota
Sales agent: Nikkatsu Corporation
Running time: 2 hr 4 mins
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