Achilles to Kame

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Movie
Original title Achilles to Kame
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 2008
length 119 minutes
Age rating FSK -
Rod
Director Takeshi Kitano
script Takeshi Kitano
production Masayuki Mori
music Kajiura Yuki
camera Katsumi Yanagishima
cut Takeshi Kitano
occupation

Achilles to Kame ( Japanese ア キ レ ス と 亀 , Akiresu to kame , Eng. " Achilles and the turtle ") is the 14th film by Takeshi Kitano . The comedy premiered in Japan on September 20, 2008. Kitano was responsible for the direction, script, editing, a leading role and, above all, the paintings .

action

In the country, at the end of the 1950s: painting and art were born in the cradle of little Machisu . Successful parents encourage their creativity to the best of their ability. The teacher also embraces the silent child from an influential family, who enriches math lessons with courage and unusual choice of motifs. Machisu even draws motor vehicles as still lifes , from the direction of travel. The friendly father, owner of a credit company and patron of the arts , hangs himself with his lover , Machisu's mother, when his company has to file for bankruptcy. Businessmen recycle everything from the house that is not nailed down, but leave Machisu's innocent images untouched.

After the happy childhood days, Machisu is placed in the care of a rather authoritarian uncle, but in picturesque surroundings. His new teachers are more traditional and rely on frontal teaching. Little Machisu makes friends with a farm worker with below-average cognitive abilities and gives him advice. His stepmother dies of suicide in the quarry . The farm worker, himself a painter, dies in a traffic accident.

When Machisu (always wearing a beret ) reached “young adulthood”, he held onto his dream despite other omens. He works for the press and sorts newspapers for a living, but is very polite. An art dealer accepts a city ​​panorama that is not entirely marketable as a gesture of goodwill and advises the autodidact to acquire art history and complete a state-regulated training course. Machisu then pans over stacks of monographs . Women begin to be interested in him, so he turns to nude painting ( Picasso's way ), but the relationship breaks up after just one picture; at the workplace in the print shop it is more likely to be needed for practical art. He assumes a spontaneous happening , Arte Povera - installations , the action painting and repeatedly broken accident art part, always slightly off standing. When the dead come, the group is devastated with grief. The artist friends get advice at the snack bar, where the cook argues with the starving children in Africa . His friend is broken with grief while walking next to him on a bridge, but was on the verge of suicide anyway.

Machisu finds a woman who "understands" him. The epoch of serial art and infantile art seems to have dawned. Stylistically, according to his constructive-critical art dealer, his true talent lies particularly in plagiarism and self-plagiarism, but he still has to save the color of his mouth.

In the so-called “middle age” Machisu has still not given up, he devotes himself to drip painting . He turns to the genre of traffic art, but always seems to be close behind the target group and business cycles. Instead, he has a daughter who has to go to work. When spraying at night , the artist couple is arrested by the owners of the shops and has to whitewash the walls, so they are censored by the state . You try political art and symbolism , where logic is lacking. Abstract self-portraits do not sell because nobody knows them. When they make a traffic accident their motive, they finally become the subject of media coverage. As a result, the daughter no longer dares to go to school. He lets his understanding, pretty wife compete against a martial arts heavyweight . As a revenge, he makes himself available as a test object in the bathtub for the art of drowning . He comes to the hospital, his wife is arrested. His wife separates from him without anything that is funny about it. He processes it with body art . His attractive daughter has become a prostitute and he borrows money from her for his paints. The silent artist gets a pimp on the nose and switches to blood art (and takes the hallucinogenic pills he got from his daughter).

His daughter dies. When he was still doing her make-up in the morgue , his ex-wife accused him of having lost all humanity, beats him and ran away. He surrenders all his creations to death in flames. A suicide attempt through car exhaust fumes because the tank is empty. On the beach he paints fire / flowers (from left to right). Under bandages with third-degree burns, he tries a broken, burnt can of soda for 200,000 yen . H. Found art . His wife returns to him at the flea market. When he limps away arm in arm with his wife and throws away the can, Achilles has finally caught up with the turtle.

Reviews

“Fortunately, there are still directors who create their own universes for their characters. [...] In between, colorful blobs cover the entire cinema screen. "

- Anke Leweke : Berliner Zeitung

Verena Lueken from the FAZ takes the film hard from an artistic point of view :

“Takeshi Kitano also painted the pictures, all of which are hideous, and it takes a bit of humor to show them off in public. […] In the end, the questions from the beginning are not answered, the victims and the lives that art demanded have piled up, and the artist is left behind without an audience as a weird fellow. "

- Verena Lueken : FAZ

Molodezhnaja.ch comments on the position in Kitano's complete works and as the last part of the Kitano trilogy (Mark Schilling): "At last, it's over."

publication

The film premiered in Tokyo, Japan on September 20, 2008.

He was seen in competition at the 65th Venice Film Festival on August 28, 2008.

Awards and nominations

Venice International Film Festival 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Features ( Memento from February 9, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. ↑ Anke Leweke: Effective trembling of the lifted lip . In: Berliner Zeitung , September 1, 2008
  3. ↑ Verena Lueken : Who will protect us from obsessions? In: FAZ . August 30, 2008, accessed March 31, 2009 .
  4. ↑ Mark Schilling: Kitano's lost the plot. In: The Japan Times . October 3, 2008, accessed March 31, 2009 .
  5. ↑ Achilles and the Tortoise. Molodezhnaja.ch, accessed on March 31, 2009 .
  6. ^ Biennale Cinema 65th Venice Film Festival August 28, 2008. In: La Biennale di Venezia. La Biennale di Venezia, archived from the original on February 25, 2009 ; accessed on September 2, 2008 .