SFIndiefest 2010: The Blood of Rebirth

Filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is known for his hip, contemporary themes, youthful urban dramas, music videos and documentaries, so his latest feature The Blood of Rebirth opening in next month's San Francisco Indiefest comes as a bit of a surprise. Based on the Japanese folktale Oguri Hangan and set in a medieval-looking time when gods and demons ruled the earth, the film depicts the trials of Oguri as he is betrayed by a diseased and megalomaniac lord, murdered, and then given the opportunity in the afterlife to return, not as a human but as a 'hungry ghost', whereupon he is rescued by the virgin concubine Terute; he is weak, virtually catatonic, and so unable to defend her against her pursuer, the same lord now greatly inflamed with anger; he struggles on towards a secret spring in which he is magically renewed, and is finally able to confront his (and Terute's) murderer once more. As a story it is about as unsophisticated as they come, which is both its blessing and its curse. The characters are unconsidered, more like signs or types than real people; the maniacal lord is absurd, as are all his functionaries, the hungry ghost (a Tibetan buddhist term of some specificity) is simply sleepy, and the virgin girl a pure cipher; the themes themselves are formulas belonging to the world of graphic novels and comics; there is some exaggeration in speech and gesture, very little in the way of depth or development and a curious lack of meaning to the story itself. But the long, haunting, visually stunning sequences of Oguri and Terute inching their way through rivers and forests, gorgeously captured on 35mm and accompanied by intense, rhythmic, bottom-heavy rock music (courtesy of Toyoda's band Twin Tail) more than make up for these failings. Toyoda has created a poem-within-a-film, a sort of stretched haiku paean to the magic of nature, and inserted it into the center of the action in such an extended way that the story becomes secondary, relegated to the function of vehicle for a very differently complected, meditative work. The lushly beautiful summer forest, its air filled with the delicate snow of Japanese anemone seeds, the stark, rocky streambeds and the driftwood-strewn beaches with their thick coils of ground fog are utterly bewitching; they conjure a mythic dreamtime which is the very element in which such stories move. This filmmaker is a lyric poet before he is a storyteller, a champion of intuitions. There is such a strange quality of innocence in these enchanted passages that we feel we are contemplating a spiritual truth. If you like swordplay, and blood, and magic, you'll enjoy the film regardless of these features, but viewers in search of cinematic artistry and a touch of something quite unique will appreciate this curious dimension of enlightened consciousness within what is otherwise a fairly standard hero's journey.