Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Arata Furuta, Tori Matsuzaka, Tomoko Tabata, Aoi Ito
Intro:
… so shocking – so brutal – it will leave you gasping.
If you’ve seen even a fragment of this film’s trailer, you already know that Intolerance centres on the death of a teenage girl. But even though you can see it coming, her demise is so shocking – so brutal – it will leave you gasping.
The teenage girl at the core of this story is Kanon (Aoi Ito). Her parents are divorced, and she lives with her fisherman father, the gruff Mitsuru (Arata Furuta). Her mother, Shoko (Tomoko Tabata), is pregnant with her new husband’s child and it’s left to the audience to figure out why Kanon lives with her strict father and not her more empathetic mother.
Kanon is caught apparently shoplifting cosmetics by supermarket owner Naoto (Tori Matsuzaka), but the audience doesn’t see the actual theft – it’s deliberately ambiguous. When the owner confronts Kanon about the alleged theft, she flees the supermarket, and he pursues her along a busy road …
Who was Kanon? Her mother tells her father that he didn’t really know her. When interviewed by a teacher, one of her classmates says that Kanon “wasn’t really memorable”. In life, she was invisible to her dad and her peers. But in death, she metaphorically haunts her father, who seeks to find out who she really was, as he tries to clear her name. She couldn’t possibly be a thief, he insists.
On the edge of this intense drama is a scavenging media, while the general public express their judgement of Kanon’s father and the supermarket owner either on social media or by leaving unpleasant notes on windscreens.
The standout performance in this piece is from established film and stage actor Arata Furuta as the angry, grieving father, who goes after the supermarket owner, steering this drama into thriller territory. Furuta is simply compelling, and like other characters here, he’s neither a hero nor a villain; not a good person nor a bad one.
Written and directed by Keisuke Yoshida (Blue, also screening at the festival), Intolerance is about raw human emotions, something we can all relate to.
