Earlier today we sort of suggested that our TIFF 2010 coverage was over. Oops, we lied....Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" is a wrongheaded morality-play. It's being billed as a revenge flick, but the cruelty in it stems less from any kind of justified retaliation and more from a deep-seated rottenness the filmmaker seems to feel has reached epidemic levels in today's Japan. It hasn't; Nakashima is just profoundly dumb. From his visual style — a muddle of slow-mo, rapid cutting, and unjustified switch-hitting between regular film stock and grainy super16 — to his histrionic script — needlessly underscored by relentless, self-consciously explanatory narration from each major character — Nakashima never for a moment lets "Confessions" become anything resembling human.
Not that all movies have to be realistic, just believable, at least in the context they've established. But the bigger problem is that Nakashima clearly intends "Confessions" to be more than just a depraved cartoon — he might even even look at this nonsense as some kind of insightful commentary on the corruptible nature of violence (like, yikes). Instead, his ludicrous narrative, which begins in a classroom, as children slurp down their afternoon milk and their beautiful young teacher (Takako Matsu) watches vacantly, just ups the crazy quotient moment to moment: Dead kids! Kids killing their moms! Killing their friends! Blowing up schools! Then there's that opening, during which teach informs her misbehaving class that she's injected two of their milk cartons with blood from her dead, HIV-infected husband. Not even Kidding.
All this is accompanied by a long monologue, during which the teacher recites, in excruciating detail, all the events that led up to the death of her toddler daughter, and her subsequent decision to take revenge on the two students who killed her. Said students can only listen in terror, either because, y'know, they may now be HIV-positive, or more likely because her sad, silly tale is also really boring. Though even by this point "Confessions" wasn't totally a lost cause, not until sometime around the seventh or eighth retelling of this same story, from the perspective of the two students themselves, their mothers, a girl from school (for some reason), the teacher again, and probably someone else I'm forgetting. This tedious repetition, coupled with a kind of Chinese Water Torture exercise of using the same three songs on repeat — Radiohead's "Last Flowers," Boris' "Rainbow," and Johann Sebastian Bach's overused "Air, Suite No. 3" — made that 'Exit' sign look oh so desirable.
But this writer didn't really check out until "Confessions" started trying to explain away the truly evil psychology of Child Murderer No. 1 with a mommy-issues device, and subsequently a cruel bit of irony that forces the kid to (Spoiler alert) but not really since the movie suggests it's all a joke) kill his mom. "Confessions" is the kind of dreck that might be easier to swallow if it acknowledged its own exploitation intents, but with every heavy-handed use of slow-mo, and with every cycle through that fucking "Air" song, it becomes more and more clear how seriously Nakashima takes his sadistic character study. And after being put through the ringer for two hours by this self-righteous maniac, I kind of wanted to force feed him some HIV milk myself. [F] Sam C. Mac, courtesy of In Review Online.
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