Sex, Drugs, and Post-Apocalyptic Plants
What’s Up Connection (1990)
Essay
Sex, Drugs, and Post-Apocalyptic Plants
By Margaret Barton-Fumo
The “nutty“ films of Masashi Yamamoto.
What’s Up Connection, Robinson’s Garden, and Saint Terrorism play 7 Ludlow this week, as part of Hachimiri Madness.
Judging from his body of work, the filmmaker Masashi Yamamoto is a very uncommon person, regularly highlighting punks and misfits since his early “hachimiri” (8mm) films. His debut feature Saint Terrorism (1980) is full of wobbly, arresting and upsetting images, captured from the fringes of society. Inhabitants of the same apartment complex commit heinous crimes, do drugs and—gasp!—have sex for fun and money, living in complete defiance of conventional propriety. The actors were all close friends and associates of Yamamoto, who was embedded within the Japanese punk scene during the 1980s. But when I ask over Zoom whether he still considers himself, now in his sixties, to be a punk, he answers, “I don’t identify as a punk and never really have.” Yamamoto has always situated himself as an outsider who chooses to surround himself with “nutty people,” much like other creatives throughout the world.
In interviews, Yamamoto often references the same term to describe his favorite characters, in film and in real life: “Aho-mitai na hito”—sometimes translated literally to “stupid people,” though Yamamoto specifies during our conversation that he prefers the term “nutty”—people who don’t take themselves too seriously, who roam the outskirts of society, often finding themselves in strange situations. Yamamoto himself had one such experience in 1981 when he traveled to the Berlin Film Festival with his sophomore film, Carnival in the Night, and struck up a quick friendship with a group of German punks. The experience became a “source of courage” for him, communicating naturally with other weirdos without the aid of language. He describes it as “one of the most impactful encounters in my life,” this brief friendship cultivated in the gutters of Berlin.
Following its success in Berlin, Carnival in the Night has since gone on to achieve cult status as a grimy window into the Japanese punk scene, following the lead character Kumi (played by Kumiko Ohta), a young mother and singer by day, and a drug-addled, gun-obsessed, terrorist-adjacent wild woman by night. Ohta also makes a cameo in Saint Terrorism, Yamamoto’s earlier, rarely screened feature that showcases his talent for embedded observation. In a hilarious bit of horrific science fiction, the director even voices the character of a rotting corpse hidden in the aforementioned apartment complex, commenting wryly on his murderer’s choices in bedroom decor (he is particularly offended by her Pink Panther plushie). Observation is key for Yamamoto, who is an entirely self-taught director, and still watches up to 500 films a year. Unlike some of his contemporaries on the hachimiri scene, such as Sogo Ishii, Yamamoto did not attend film school and so learned the techniques of moviemaking using a basic how-to manual, often through disastrous trial and error. He initially used newsprint, for example, to diffuse his lights, and only shifted to wax paper after his first experiment caught fire.
His journey as a young filmmaker finds echoes in that of Kumi (again, played by Ohta) in Robinson’s Garden (1987), who teaches herself how to farm while perusing a book with a title that translates to “Even Morons Can Grow Vegetables.” Again bringing her own eccentric personality to the role, Ohta shines as a squatter Robinson Crusoe, living inside a massive abandoned warehouse, and converting its sprawling greenery into a doomed vegetable garden. Inspired at the time by a traveling dinosaur exhibition, Yamamoto was struck by the brevity of human history in comparison to that of natural life, and began to entertain thoughts of post-apocalyptic plants. Inspired, too, by the medicinal herb dokudami, which surprisingly was found growing among the ruins of Hiroshima, Yamamoto created the character of a lone, pigtailed brat who appears often in Kumi’s garden, blithely playing among the crops. Populated with characters of many different types and nationalities, Robinson’s Garden also had a multicultural crew behind the scenes, including American cinematographer Tom DiCillo and his camera assistant Jim Hayman. Yamamoto originally expressed interest in working with Néstor Almendros, or Kurosawa’s cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, but Jim Jarmusch suggested DiCillo, who had recently shot Stranger Than Paradise (1984). The result is a film that is literally lush, green and vibrant, with incredible wide shots and a smattering of effects. Shot early on in DiCillo’s career, Robinson’s Garden reflects a beautifully delicate compromise of aesthetic choices (the director and his cinematographer would sometimes disagree), with expressively lit night scenes, and roving takes that wind smoothly through packed crowds. Centered on Ohta’s striking, final performance for Yamamoto (she simply did not care for acting), Robinson’s Garden is a punchy, radical film, in stark contrast to the blind opulence of the Bubble Economy era in contemporary Japan.
Saint Terrorism (1980)
For his next film, What’s Up Connection (1990), which the distributor Kani Releasing describes accurately as an “unhinged globalization mini-epic,” Yamamoto drew energy from rural fishing villages and the “vulgar, loud and boisterous” community therein. Taking place partly in Japan and partly in Po Toi O, Hong Kong, What’s Up Connection follows a gloriously “nutty” family of Hong Kongers who suspiciously win a set of international trips, inciting the teenage son Gau Shin (Tse Wai-kit of 1988’s School on Fire) to travel to the Land of the Rising Sun. Returning home with a lackadaisical Japanese tour guide and a small-time crook in tow, Gau Shin and his family soon realize that they have been set up by a multinational development company seeking to purchase their water-top property (basically, a house on a raft). Determined to hold onto their modest home and rake in some cash too, multiple hijinks ensue as the family faces off against the evil conglomerate and its slick-suited, slimy henchmen. What’s Up Connection is hilarious and spry, blissfully over-the-top in both comedy and style, with a deliriously funked-out fusion soundtrack composed by the late Toshinori Kondo. A polished portrayal of cross-cultural exchange run amok, the film amassed a quick following upon its release, due to Yamamoto’s unconventional style of grassroots marketing. Allowing its popularity to spread through word of mouth, Yamamoto and his associates created a temporary movie theater (akin to a “pop-up” in today’s lingo), where they only screened What’s Up Connection for six months. Attendance was robust, and the film performed relatively well in Japan.
Over 30 years have passed since the film’s initial release, but its style is still cutting edge while its general theme (outsiders versus a corporate entity) continues to carry weight. When asked if he could think of any younger filmmakers who seem to be following in his footsteps, Yamamoto lamented that the current generation (filmmakers and beyond) are “trending toward being more reserved.” The only person who immediately came to his mind following a similar punk ethos was Tomita Katsuya, a Japanese director who lived in Thailand for a period and made a film called Bangkok Nites in 2016. As for Yamamoto himself, he happily confesses that he is “going back to [his] roots,” and writing a script that takes place in Kyushu, where he is from. He is optimistic about this current project: “Not to toot my own horn, but I think it’s shaping up to be really good.” One can only hope that it will eventually reach us in the US.
Many thanks to Monika Uchiyama for her keen insight and for interpreting the interview with Masashi Yamamoto.
Margaret Barton-Fumo is the host of "No Pussyfooting" on KPISS.FM and the author of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews (UPM). She is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and has written on film and music since 2005.
Robinson’s Garden (1987)