Last week the New York Times published an article on Sara J. Rudolph, a survivor of the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls, one of them Rudolph’s older sister. While the motive behind the bombing was racist, Rudolph said she would never understand how “someone could be that cold.” Now 50, she jumps at loud noises. She said, “There will never be any closure for me.”
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These critics seem to be judging the film by the character-centered, action-driven standards of commercial cinema, where many foreign directors also march to the Hollywood beat. Those “long, barren sequences” enrich Eureka as surprisingly powerful and precise articulations of the void within the characters. And as thoroughly Japanese excursions into an open space drained of traditional meanings, they take on a hypnotic, meditative quality of their own.
We never see the initial hijacking–or most of the killings–and we never learn the reason for it. The event seems like a force of nature: unalterable, beyond analysis. Aoyama, who also wrote the script, has said he was thinking of the 1995 nerve-gas killings in the Tokyo subway and of the general condition of postwar Japan. But the incident can also stand in for any of the countless acts of senseless violence that occur all over the world.
In Hollywood cinema and its international offshoots, compositions, camera movements, and editing closely follow characters as if under their control, implying the characters are indeed autonomous. Though Eureka employs these same methods to acknowledge the will of its characters, it also uses other methods to suggest they’re less than independent. When Makoto meets his estranged wife, the scene begins with a shot of tall buildings and bridges seen through a restaurant window; the camera then moves around the characters as they talk, deflecting attention from their faces and suggesting that their growing alienation is somehow out of their control.
Rootlessness is nowhere more elegantly expressed than in one long take set in yet another parking lot. This is when we learn the identity of the serial killer (if you don’t want to know the film’s ending, stop reading). Naoki has disappeared from the bus, and Makoto goes to search for him. We discover the boy in close-up, wielding the small knife that he had earlier used to slash tall plants in a field. Naoki crouches as he pursues a woman. Then he’s frightened by a starting car just as Makoto emerges from the shadows to confront him. The camera changes functions several times; at one point it leaves the pursuing Naoki behind, assuming the place of the stalker. The viewer is thus put through a series of emotional shifts–fearing for the woman, then identifying with the killer, then identifying with Makoto’s attempts to subdue him. This also expresses the emotional chaos of the characters: indeed, Makoto had earlier admitted that he too had been tempted to kill.
