Labyrinth of Cinema

A small cinema in Onomichi is closing. On the last night it runs a programme of war films, and three young men in the hall are pulled into the screen. They fall into the films and move backwards through Japan's history of war: the civil wars, the China front, the Pacific, and finally Hiroshima in 1945. At every stop they try to save a girl, and every time they are too late. Nobuhiko Obayashi writes and directs. The film runs close to three hours. The visual style intervenes constantly: colours shift, backgrounds are openly artificial, actors look at the camera and historical footage is mixed with drawing. Obayashi refuses realism deliberately. It is his last film. He was diagnosed with cancer while making the previous one and the doctors gave him months; he lived several more years and finished this. He died in April 2020, on the day the film was to open in Japan. What the narrative says is plain: cinema could not stop the war, but it can show it. The characters try to change history from inside the films and cannot. Onomichi is the town where Obayashi was born and the setting of most of the films of his career. Who it is for: viewers who follow Japanese cinema and formally radical work. Who it is not for: it is very long, the visual density is exhausting, the historical references are closed from outside, and the narrative does not move in a line.