Screening out of competition in the Berlinale Special section, Ishii Gakuryu’s “The Box Man” had a long and difficult gestation. Based on a 1973 novel by Abe Kobo, this film about a man who wears a cardboard box as a mobile carapace started as a successful pitch from Ishii to Abe 32 years ago.
“Abe had seen my films and liked them,” says Ishii at the office of the film’s production company and local distributor, Happinet Phantom Studios. “We had an interesting talk and he said he would let me make a film [of the novel].”
At the time Ishii was a leader of Japan’s indie scene, with credits that included the punk rock-themed “Burst City” (1982) and the black comedy “The Crazy Family” (1984). He also had a German connection with his 1986 documentary “1/2 Mensch” (“1/2 Man”) about the underground band Einstuerzende Neubauten.
Then, in 1997, the day before shooting was to begin in Hamburg, Germany, the project fell through. “There was a problem with the Japanese financing,” Ishii says.
Two of the leading actors from the 1997 production — Nagase Masatoshi and Sato Koichi — star in the new one, but Ishii and co-writer Kiyotaka Inagaki “substantially re-wrote the script,” Ishii says. “Mr. Abe himself told me he wanted the film of the novel to be entertaining, so we tried to create a sophisticated cinematic fusion of the novel’s essence and the entertainment elements.
“Also, the film is taken from a 1973 novel, but I didn’t want to do a nostalgia piece,” he adds. “I wanted to set the story in the present and strengthen the main female character. I thought I had to pay attention to those two points. Otherwise, there would be no reason to make the film.”
Newcomer Shiramoto Ayana plays a nurse in a rundown clinic whose two doctors, a dying sybarite known as the “General” (Sato) and his sketchy unlicensed assistant (frequent Ishii collaborator Asano Tadanobu) are strangely fixated on a box-wearing homeless man (Nagase), who warily observes the outside world through a slit in his box and frantically writes his thoughts in a tattered notebook.
Despite being an object of the doctors’ desire and often appearing in various stages of undress, the nurse reacts to the at-times bizarre proceedings from a cool-eyed distance. “I wanted to make her something of a riddle,” says Ishii. “But she is also a woman who decides and acts on her own. [Shiramoto] worked on the role very earnestly, in her own way.”
The film, however, is more than a social drama about homelessness or a black comic examination of abnormal psychology. The nameless Box Man, who was once a photographer obsessed with a “real” box man and lives in a bubble of his own making, serves as a metaphor for contemporary society, Ishii believes.
“I feel that we’re all box men now,” says Ishii. “Abe’s novel was a prophetic book that anticipated the information society of today. That’s where Abe’s genius lies. That’s why I wanted to set the film in the present.”
At the same time, the novel, with its shifting narrators and dreamlike structure that resists pat interpretations, was long considered all-but unfilmable. “ ‘The Box Man’ is a wonderful novel, but I thought it would be almost impossible to film it as it is, so I tried to make a version that retains the essential character of the novel,” Ishii says.
When he and Inagaki wrote the script, he explains, “We tried to make the story easier for the audience to understand. … At the same time, we wanted to convey the most important points of the original work. So the film is both entertainment and serious drama. Yes, I want the audience to laugh, but also to see themselves in the characters.”
On returning to Germany, where the first shoot of “The Box Man” failed to launch 27 years ago, Ishii admits to feeling a certain nervousness, but he hopes the Berlin audience “will enjoy the film and find it interesting.” “The staff was excellent and the actors were excellent,” he says. “I think it turned out to be a very good production.”
