Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future, the latest contribution to an auteur’s body of work that has come to define in great part contemporary Asian cinema, examines the enfeebled condition of the young men and women of Generation Nothing-to-do-nowhere-to-go. It’s a departure for Kurosawa, a director best known for his horror/thrillers, and it shows. In hits like Cure and Pulse, Kurosawa displays remarkable genre mastery: his mise-en-scène and cutting surprise and often transcend the stylistics of his historic exemplars; Bright Future on the other hand evinces a more derivative shaky aesthetic. Nevertheless, it’s Kurosawa’s most impassioned and mysterious work. Without ever losing sight of his moral responsibility, he takes a narrative normally rooted in realism and turns it on its head. As muddied as it sometimes looks­­it’s shot on DV and film­­Bright Future is clearly the work of a major artist who understands the younger generation’s contemporary malaise, but more importantly, charts the arduous path toward political and social recuperation.

Fit, handsome, and stylish, Mamoru (Asano Tadanobu) and Yuji (Odagiri Jô) should, at the very least, have successful careers as print models, but instead, they waste their days at the same commercial laundry plant sifting through soiled linens and running errands for their grizzled manager. Unlike others their age, whose belief in a better future identity justifies whatever crappy day jobs they have now, Mamoru and Yuji lack ambition, professionally and socially. Without hope­­at the beginning of the film, Yuji admits he’s had few dreams about the future­­or any force that gives him meaning, Yuji is a big bore. He’s the sort of pretty face you’d want to show up at a party with but not the kind of man you’d want to be stuck sitting across from at a dinner table. Kurosawa affirms the phenomenological position that a person’s identity is shaped not so much by what one has done but rather by what one hopes to become. And when an individual cannot see who he will be, or worse, is reluctant to even imagine a future self positively or negatively, then he is, in the deepest sense, nothing. Kurosawa obviously sees this as a problem that condemns the individual and the collective to oblivion, a terrible, existential understanding of being. Mamoru comes to grips with this early on in the film and does what makes sense for an individual with nothing to stretch his hand out for: he kills his manager’s family.

Mamoru’s murder wakes Yuji to action. Just before he is incarcerated, Mamoru charges Yuji with the responsibility of not only taking care of his pet jellyfish, but also, following specific instructions that, if carried out correctly, will enable the jellyfish to thrive in the freshwater of Tokyo’s canals and rivers. Given a mission—albeit a completely weird and insane one—Yuji is galvanized into meaningful being. At first he’s completely game, but then like a petulant child, Yuji gets frustrated: he kicks the tank over in his bedroom and the jellyfish slides between the floorboards only to drop miraculously into a body of water. Then Mamoru hangs himself. The next day, Yuji sees that the jellyfish has not only adapted to the freshwater beneath the floor but also glows like some supernatural entity straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This marvelous revelation sets off a series of social and political interactions that are so new to him that he often doesn’t know how to behave. Yuji isn’t just a new person: he’s reborn into a world where he has a future. Kurosawa gets it right: when an individual sees the future as the temporal state that gives one meaning and begins to take the steps necessary to actualize it, there are going to be growing pains. Fucking up is evidence of one’s engagement with the world, as Yuji proves when he and a group of Che Guevara-shirt-wearing misfits­­one of the film's many stunning images­­decide to loot his sister’s office. As a political act, it’s a poor choice, but as a social one, it shows that Yuji has only just begun to participate in the world.

On the positive side, Yuji begins to connect spiritually to Mamoru’s father: the two men find restorative peace in one another. For reasons unclear to the audience, Yuji asks the father to “forgive him,” and the father says, “I forgive you.” This psychic connection, rare between strangers, is a mystery Kurosawa leaves intact. In fact, there is a lot left unexplained, a choice that underscores the air of potential that permeates the narrative. At first, Bright Future may have seemed a snarky, ironic title for a film that starts with a dark image of gun-toting hood and a ferociously nihilistic voiceover, but by the end of the film, it seems all too fitting.
­ALEX CHUNG