NYAFF Picks: This World of Ours
THIS WORLD OF OURS is a film about teenagers spinning out of control in Tokyo, and here’s the first shot of the film:
Pretty exploitative, right? Pretty tasteless? Insensitive? Immature?
I thought the same thing as I started watching the movie, and then, over the course of the next 92 minutes, director Ryo Nakajima convinced me that he’d earned the shot. THIS WORLD OF OURS isn’t a teen angst film that revolves around who’s going to the prom with whom, or who’s in love with someone who can never understand them, or who’s flunking out of AP Algebra. It’s a movie that acknowledges that the stakes are higher for teen angst these days. Teen angst caused the Columbine Massacre. It causes suicides, it causes murder, it causes rape and self-mutilation. It’s not funny anymore.
Nakajima traces a line from 9/11 to teenagers cutting themselves, and the line goes: why can’t I change the world?
Who hasn’t felt this way? We wake up, day after day, trapped in the same old world with the same bills to pay. The big things seem beyond us, but the small things aren’t worth living for. Nakajima points out that when teenagers go off the rails it happens at the moment when they realize they’re not special, that they’re going to have to fit into the world around them, that they aren’t going to be rock stars or great leaders or movie stars, but just ordinary people. And faced with a future like that, with years stretching ahead of them like a prison sentence, where nothing ever changes, they go crazy. Usually temporarily, but sometimes permanently.
THIS WORLD OF OURS is about the making of a teenage terrorist, and it asks us to have some sympathy for the devil. What drove the people who piloted those planes into the World Trade Center, what drove the kids at Columbine to start shooting, was nothing more than a desire to change the world. Politics? Religion? Whatever. It’s the movie star instinct, teen angst writ large. It’s that desperate desire to be remembered, to make a difference, to show the world that we’re people too, not just a faceless demographic. Some people are talented and they can write a book or star in a movie, and that satisfies their drive to be somebody. Other people don’t have that drive, they just want a “normal” life. But for a huge number of people, trapped in this world of ours, who feel the urge and who don’t have the patience or the talent or the luck to make something different out of their lives, what are their options? A job at 7-11? Working at Goldman Sachs filing contract briefs for all eternity? If the thought of a family and a white picket fence makes them feel sick, then what?
Nakajima was 24 years old when he made THIS WORLD OF OURS, and from the age of 19 he’d been a hikikomori. One of Japan’s shut-ins, hikikomori hole themselves up in their bedrooms or in their apartments, like Brian Wilson, hiding from a world that overwhelms them. What drove Nakajima out of his front door was a desperate desire to connect with people. He wanted to tell them what he was thinking and how it felt to be him. And so THIS WORLD OF OURS is his message in a bottle. It’s an S-O-S from a kid who’s fed up with the world, and who’s taking a chance that other people will either understand where he’s coming from, or they’ll remember what it was like to be young and feel restlessness twisting in your gut like a snake. It’s a postcard from the teenaged wasteland and on one side is the World Trade Center, burning eternally, and on the other are three Japanese kids who are screaming with rage and frustration and he wants to make sure that we never forget that people can’t be reduced to their religion or their politics or their demographics. No matter what they do, they’re still people and if we’re honest with ourselves there’s nothing they can do that we can’t understand.
And that’s what makes THIS WORLD OF OURS one of the rawest, scariest, most upsetting and most heartbreaking movies we’re showing this year.
Critics have been whinnying on about post-9/11 art and finding movies that deal with the it. So far we’ve had to settle for an Adam Sandler movie and a Nic Cage/Oliver Stone film. Finally, here’s a movie that faces 9/11 head-on and uses it to say something new. If you know your directors, then think of this as a Shunji Iwai movie about 9/11. If you don’t know who that is, then just realize that this is something you’ve never seen before: a movie about terrorism that’ll break your heart and shatter your faith in this world we’ve built.
(Showtimes and ticket information for THIS WORLD OF OURS)
(quick note: that’s not literally the exact same shot of the World Trade Center burning that starts THIS WORLD OF OURS. The shot Nakajima uses is much worse, to my mind, since it’s taken from much closer, but fortunately I couldn’t find it anywhere.)