Kagi (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Kagi |
| Original title | Kagi / 鍵 |
| Country of production | Japan |
| original language | Japanese |
| Publishing year | 1959 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Kon Ichikawa |
| script |
Keiji Hasebe Kon Ichikawa Natto Wada based on the novel The Key by Junichirō Tanizaki |
| production |
Hiroaki Fujii Masaichi Nagata for Daiei |
| music | Yasushi Akutagawa |
| camera | Kazuo Miyagawa |
| cut | Hiroaki Fujii |
| occupation | |
| |
Kagi ( Japanese 鍵 , dt. "Key") is a tragicomic Japanese feature film from 1959 by Kon Ichikawa .
action
The story begins with the aging Kiōtoer art historian Kenji Kenmochi, who is checked in by his family doctor in the treatment room. Kenji's blood pressure is way too high and the brain has poor blood supply. "Be careful not to get too upset," advises the doctor. Kenji's life runs completely on well-worn tracks. He feels total emptiness in his old marriage. In order to get his love life going again and to achieve new (physical and mental) fitness through erotic stimuli, he tries to arouse interest in his own wife Ikuko in the assistant doctor Kimura, the fiancé of his daughter Toshiko. But he was advised like her husband: “Don't worry!”. But now it is precisely excitement that both of them crave. So Kenji comes up with the crazy idea that the jealousy resulting from this constellation could bring him sexually back on his toes and revive the declining potency. But with this idea he threatens to score an own goal. Not only is Kimura a calculating greyhound who hopes to marry into a wealthy family - especially since the future parents-in-law are obviously sick and could soon be laughing at a fat inheritance. Rather, the assistant doctor begins to perceive and exploit the opportunity offered unduly. More than Kenji could love, Kimura and Ikuko now begin to develop a real interest in each other. Soon everything gets out of hand, the scientist's wife and future son-in-law become a couple.
Of course, this fact does not remain hidden from Kenji's daughter Toshiko, Kimura's still fiancé. Of all those involved, she remains the only one who is pure of heart and sees clearly. And yet at the same time she will be the only one who makes real preparations for murder precisely because of this basic decency. Feeling deeply hurt and betrayed, and unwilling to just let Kimura go, she plans to get her own mother out of the way and poison her. If their parents are no longer able to lead married life, then at least none of them should ruin their relationship with Kimura! To do this, Toshiko mixes a special remedy in the tea consumed every day. But the poisoned tea completely misses its effect. Because the old, a bit shaky cook has swapped the tea box for another. Instead, she now sprinkles the poison, a highly effective and excruciatingly painful herbicide, in the lettuce, which eventually wears away the entire family. Standing in the doorway, the old woman looks at her fatal act with absolute equanimity. "I killed her," she will say emotionlessly to the investigator, as if she had done humanity a favor. Finally three hearses roll away while the birds outside chirp happily.
production
The story, a mixture of pitch-black comedy and bitter sharp social analysis, based on the novel The key of Junichiro Tanizaki . Kagi was shot in 1958 and premiered in Japan on June 23, 1959. The film opened in Germany on March 4, 1963.
Awards
At the film festival in Cannes in 1960 received Kagi the Jury Prize ex aequo with Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura . In addition, director Ichikawa was nominated for the Palme d' Or.
In 1960 Kagi had to share the Golden Globe in the category “Best Foreign Film” with Die Brücke , Wilde Erdbeeren , Wir Wunderkinder and Orfeu Negro .
Natto Wada received the Kinema Jumpō Prize for Best Screenplay (1960).
The 1960 Blue Ribbon Award went to Ichikawa for Best Director.
Reviews
In film review 2/63 Kagi was discussed in detail:
“ A hair-raising story that ends in the novel with the old man being touched during an act of love. Whereupon the wife and daughter can continue the relationship with their mutual lover undisturbed. He can even listen for a while before he dies for good. It seems unthinkable that it could be made into a film. Ichikawa, however, succeeds in transforming the intimate confessions of the two into a medical history, which by the best of all Japanese cameramen, Kazuo Miyagawa, is reproduced in sublimely nuanced but extremely closed color photographs, like artificial flowers under glass, and at the end with a bang from which Grand Guignol clears all figures from the picture surface. (...) Kagi is not an easy film. Especially the friends of pornography will not get their money's worth. But those who do not shy away from the misunderstandings that inevitably lurk between the demarcation lines of cultures will find plenty of cause to wonder and worry. "
Reclam's guide wrote about Kagi: "" The critics who saw this film as a 'black comedy' are quite right. I wanted to create a comic effect. I mean, when people cheat as much as the characters in Kagi do it, then it's weird precisely because it's so sad "(Kon Ichikawa). The brief synopsis suggests a hair-raising shocker. Ichikawa staged his presentation with the cool distance of a clinical report. For him, the 'medical history' also becomes a reflection of a sick society. In the end, the cook consistently cleans up this company. "
Handbook VII of the Catholic Film Critics found, based on a strictly Christian view of values from 1963: "The strange pagan way of life and the danger of misunderstanding the plot require an attentive and critical audience."
The lexicon of international films writes: "A film that aims at the hollowness of convention and unfolds its plot in a stylish and unspeculative manner."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 364. Stuttgart 1973.
- ^ Films 1962/64, Düsseldorf 1965, p. 91
- ↑ Kagi in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed on November 4, 2013.
Web links
- Kagi in the Internet Movie Database (English)