Caterpillar (2010)

Koji Wakamatsu's anti-war film Catepillar (2010) is notable for it's strong anti-nationalism stance and Shinobu Terajima's powerful performance as a long suffering wife dealt a poor hand in life (one in which she won an acting award at the Berlin Film Festival). Her husband is returned from war, as a "God of War" with decorations, without limbs, the ability to speak or hear. Her role as a good wife of a soldier of the Emperor's is to take good care of him-a thankless task for a man who only eats, sleeps, and demands sex from his wife. Furthermore, we learn that he was an abusive husband and has committed atrocities in the war in China. Wakamatsu is a member of that older generation and has an ax to grind-one that the nationalists of today wouldn't be so happy about either. It's a difficult film to watch, but perhaps necessary since most of the new generations are unaware or unbelieving of the atrocities committed at war by the Japanese in the name of the emperor due to whitewashing to history textbooks in schools.

Though he's not credited, this film seems to be based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, which has previously been adapted in the anthology film Rampo Noir. This film transports the story to the WWII era. Keigo Kasuya returns home from the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1940 a quadruple amputee - no arms, no legs - without the ability to speak. His wife (Shinobu Terajima) is reviled, but soon falls back into her position as loyal spouse. The film examines the patriotic fervor of the times - Kasuya is declared a "war god" and is worshiped by the locals. Privately, the couple's life is Hell. A power struggle arises between them, and Terajima - who before the war was a victim of abuse by her husband - realizes she has power that she didn't have before. The political aspects of the film are the most interesting part. The focus on sex - which was the main focus of Rampo's story - gets a tad boring after a while. Both leads are fantastic, particularly Terajima, who obviously has a lot more to do. The film could stand to look better - it was filmed digitally and transferred to film, and is very murky. All in all, it's quite good.

The husband returns to his Japanese mountain village from the Sino-Japanese war without arms, legs, ability to talk or hear much, apparently brain-damaged, and badly scarred on the face and scalp. The horror of this person's existence is amplified by the contrast with the patriotic and disconnected propaganda from the Japanese government and media that the village folk all seem to swallow without question. He is proclaimed a living War God with medals and a framed laudatory news article that hang on the wall. The village people line the streets to welcome home the living War God, cheering and marching in copy of military march, and the living War God is delivered to his unbelieving wife. Taking care of this lump of flesh will be her task from here on. She tries. She puts the food in one end, sometimes sacrificing her own food to meet her husband's demands, and wipes up the other end. He eats, sleeps, eliminates, and demands sex. This goes on and on, and one can imagine the wife's life of drudgery in an endless cycle stretching into the distant future. Her husband has never been a nice person. He beat her on a daily basis before marching off to do his patriotic duty in war, and now that he is back, he continues to demand from her. At first food and sex, which he demands through grunts and facial expressions, are gratifying to him, but as time goes on, these lose all their appeal. As a soldier he had raped a woman in China, and the memory of this comes back to haunt him and interfere with any pleasure from sex. His wife puts him in a cart and parades him around the village, the limbless living War God on display. The wife is dutiful but increasingly angry and despairing, and the tour of the village with her husband in the cart becomes a kind of revenge for her. Eventually in private she is mashing raw eggs into his mouth and slapping him. All the while she is looked up to in the village for her patriotic sacrifice. This movie is a grim commentary on the discrepancy between patriotic imaginings of war and the actual brutality of war and its tragic consequences. The movie ponders the consequences of societal pressure to do one's duty on the battlefield and in marriage.

In premise, "Caterpillar" (the English translation of the title of a short story by masterful mystery author Edogawa Ranpo on which the movie draws heavily) may call to mind Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun", but whereas the latter dwells entirely on the slug of a man left from the battlefield, the former actually focuses on the wife who must care for and cater to a deified deformity of a husband. Director Wakamatsu walks the viewer through the war with newsreel footage and announcements from the "Daihonei" Imperial Headquarters, which duped the public into thinking their forces were winning victory after victory. There is also the text of the article prohibiting capture or surrender from the "Senjinkun" (Combatants' Code), which was distributed to all soldiers in early 1941 under the name of Hideki Tojo, and was a key factor behind the suicidal attacks and just plain suicides (voluntary or compelled) by Japanese soldiers throughout the war. Kurokawa (the husband) comes back limbless and mute, but there is nothing wrong with him downstairs, as his hapless wife soon discovers. There ensues a kind of sexual warfare between the two, portraits of the emperor and empress solemnly gazing down at the lurid scenes all the while, that lasts as long as the war. I took Kurokawa's attempted suicide as an attempt to end his personal torment, not as a sign of repentance for his own crimes per se. No one saves or is saved in this flick.After the intense fixation on the couple and the rural home front, the A-blasts and war's end seem to break the spell, and the film embraces a more general anti-war sentiment. I felt this diluted the impact, but audiences (especially those in Japan) will do well to ponder the figure of 20 million on the screen at the film's end for the estimated WWII death toll in Asia alone.Shinobu Terajima turns in a bravura performance as the wife (though she looked laughably incongruous standing in a rice paddy, farming implement in unaccustomed hand, her fair and flawless complexion shining under the sun - far cry from a sun-beaten peasant- woman!), and Shin Onishi, a creditable one in a difficult role.Wakamatsu again showed courage in making this film, as he did with "United Red Army". I guess this is why mention of his name often elicits groans in Japan. He must be doing something right.