New favourite movie:

Seventh Code, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, starring Atsuko Maeda. We watched it in Japanese class today. The entire thing only elapses 60 minutes. Basic premise: A Japanese girl runs around Russia.

Truthfully, I’m not so fond of movies. If you were to have asked me what my favourite was, I would probably have answered with The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, simply because it’s the continuation of one of my favourite anime series.

So why did I like this one? It has pretty terrible reviews, and everyone else in my class unanimously disliked it (except Sensei, of course). Well, you can’t just look at this movie like a normal movie, because it certainly isn’t. If you tried to analyse the characters, dialogue, acting, themes… Seventh Code would fall flat, except for in the music department (and only for, like, five minutes, anyway). 

But Seventh Code is odd, and we’ll treat it that way. In this rant-y, review-type thing, I’ll discuss the reasons why this movie is THE BEST MOVIE EVAR. 

At first glance, nothing about this movie seems very original, or interesting, or well put-together at all. The characters are bland, the storyline is cliché, and the filming is incredibly shaky. With awful subs (all your plan have been destroyed), watching Seventh Code feels like watching a tenth-grader’s school project (albeit a tenth-grader who spends way too much time on such things). The movie does begin to get interesting later on, but the plot twist had been predicted way in advance, so I can’t even say much about that. I can come up with a long list of things that would point to this movie being awful, awful, awful.

However, amidst all these terrible factors, there are plenty of points of merit to talk about. The short sideplot about the restaurant owner’s girlfriend’s desire for power and her rather disturbing monologue to accompany it, as well as her contrast with the restaurant owner’s ambitions makes you think about the shortness of our lives, the realisation of our aspirations, and why we want the things that we want. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the restaurant owner will never achieve what he wants, but he still keeps trying anyway, day after day, even though he can’t see any chance of success in front of him. Sound familiar? To many, I’m sure.

In fact, the restaurant owner and his girlfriend were some pretty decent characters who did get some good backstories and personality-building. Their lives were a nice break from the strange running action we saw quite a lot of, and were shown in a manner I can only call ‘casual’. It felt like I was gazing into the normal, everyday lives of ordinary (well, kinda poor, but that just drives it even further) people. Although the characters have only known the main character for a few days, there’s a kind of ‘casual intimacy’ that goes on between them, and they bond quite well in the few days of interaction that they have. Even though this story takes place in Russia, many elements of the two characters’ lives are relatable to us here in a strange, calming sense of normalcy.

Of course, the movie speeds up in plot and some interesting things happen (spoilers!). There’s a pretty cool action scene and some dubious science, but the part that really makes the movie so amazing isn’t actually part of the movie. It’s the part where you’re sitting on some plastic chairs on a Friday afternoon, staring at a lights from a low-budget projector display on tacky drywall in a dim room lit by incandescent lamps, screaming with your classmates as you watch the unassuming characters fly at each other across the screen and mockingly repeating the botched subtitles.

Yes, the biggest point about Seventh Code is the experience of watching it with other people. I truly would not have enjoyed the movie nearly as much had I watched it alone. The movie has enough amounts of ‘mindfuck’ to get you apprehensive, but not enough to make it, like, DHMIS weird or NSFW. Perhaps movies are meant to be enjoyed equally as well alone or with others, but as I’m not a movie connoisseur, it has no bearing on how great I think this movie is.

Between the life of the restaurant characters that perhaps hits a little too close to home and the amount of energy that comes from the screaming audience, Seventh Code intersects a cross-section of poor Japanese and Russian life with a cross-section of Western High School life and makes it work. That’s what makes this movie so awesome.

In the (translated) words of Akiko Yosano,
“Now, the heaven’s day shall belong to me / Move the golden vehicle forward / Stormy winds sweep from the East / Now, let’s pursue one’s self with good grace.”