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ACCURACY OF DEATH, aka SWEET RAIN (Japan, 2008)

NEW YORK PREMIERE

114 minutes, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles
Directed by: Masaya Kakei
Starring: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Manami Konishi, Sumiko Fuji, Ken Mitsuishi, Takuya Ishida

Showtimes: THU July 3, 8.45pm at Japan Society [Buy Tickets];
FRI July 4, 12:15pm at Japan Society [Buy Tickets].
Note: "Buy Tickets" links will take you to the IFC Center website (for shows at IFC Center) and to Japan Society website (for shows at Japan Society). Tickets for each venue must be purchased separately

 


It sounds like a formula made in Hell: a music-loving version of the Grim Reaper and his talking dog come to Earth to judge whether certain individuals are ready to die or not. But what results is a movie that’s so charming, so un-ironic and so invested in the idea that life is worth living, that - like ALWAYS and ALWAYS 2 - it serves to turbo-charge your sense of hope. Taiwanese / Japanese heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro plays a God of Death (there are more than one) tasked to spend a week with those who’ve been assigned a sudden demise. If he feels that they don’t deserve to die, then he can put their death on hold, but if he thinks they’ve fulfilled their potential, then it’s “Proceed.” Keeping him on task is a hard-assed, cynical, telepathic dog. Stay with us here.


Set across a period of forty years – in which Kaneshiro's character, much like the actor himself, never ages – the charismatic but lonely Reaper encounters three lost souls who brush too close to Death. In 1988, he considers the case of a young office lady (Manami Konishi, from last year's RETRIBUTION) who lives an unlucky, quiet life she hardly considers worth living, toiling as a customer service rep for an electronics company. In 2008 he has to judge the death-worthiness of a middle-aged yakuza (Ken Mitsuishi, also in this year's SAD VACATION) locked in the middle of a gang war and in danger of being sold down the river by his bosses. And in the future, he meets a feisty hair stylist (former female yakuza movie goddess Sumiko Fuji, known in her heyday as Junko) who has reached the end of her life but has managed to alienate her entire family along the way, abandoning her son and refusing to reconcile with him. Each of these stories slyly overlaps with the others in unexpected ways, characters from one popping up in another, and through it all the movie always makes the least-expected choice.


If you’re a fan of Neil Gaiman’s award-winning Sandman comic book, then you’ll realize while watching ACCURACY that this is the closest you’ll get to a Sandman movie any time soon. What could have been a cloying, sentimental disaster – banish all thoughts of Brad Pitt and JOE BLACK from your mind – turns out to be an unexpected triumph. The first step on that road was the casting of Kaneshiro in his first Japanese movie in six years, and it’s immediately obvious why he’s appeared in movies by Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou and John Woo – he can telegraph waves of emotion with just a well-timed tilt of his head or slightly upturned smile. Sometimes an actor takes a potentially unpromising part and turns it into an amazing meal, and Kaneshiro does just that here, completely dominating the movie, and deservedly so. Every second we spend in his hands feels like pure gold, and by the time the movie ends on a minor chord, he has single-handedly sold us on the idea that death is nothing more than one more inevitable part of being alive.