Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.
Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu offers up mystery aplenty in his new film The Third Murder, enigma and riddle too. He also moves away from the territory of family drama for which he is best known. There’s similar intensity in some of the relationships between characters here as in his previous work, and it’s engrossingly atmospheric – some visual elements speak as strongly as anything the director has made, while Ludovico Einaudi’s piano/cello-dominated score is almost a player in itself – but even for Kore-eda fans it will surely come as a surprise.
The opening scene of The Third Murder does indeed depict a killing, but the director then spends the next two hours slowly demolishing any sense of certainty we began with about what was actually done, and by whom, let alone why. It isn’t a courtroom drama, though part of the second half does play out in that environment, but rather a legal procedural, overlaid with philosophical elements, and permeated with a sense of life’s strange whimsy that sometimes isn’t far away in feel from the work of Haruki Murakami.
The cycles and variations of parent and child relationships continue
The central relationship is between confessed murderer Misumi (Koji Yakusho) and his lead lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama, one of Japan’s top singer-songwriters, whose screen career includes Kore-eda’s 2013 Like Father, Like Son), who’s been brought into the case by his senior colleague to try to clarify things. Given the confession, the lawyers’ main preoccupation is to try to avoid the death sentence (which remains in force in Japan): the film’s title, we assume, is explained by the fact that Misumi had previously served 30 years for a double murder, making such a verdict all the more likely. The judge in that earlier case had been Shigemori’s father, prompting some reflection on the ethics of capital punishment (not to mention the human condition), but Kore-eda doesn’t take any strong stand on that issue per se.
Misumi’s position at the opening seems clear, and he has admitted his guilt: having stolen money to fuel a gambling habit, he bludgeoned to death the owner of the small factory where he had been working, and then burnt the body. It’s when he starts to change the details of that story that confusion sets in, prompting in Shigemori a growing engagement that sees him travelling to meet the victim’s wife and daughter (Hirose Suzu is particularly striking as the daughter, pictured below, right), as well as research other aspects of his client’s past. It takes him to some of the remoter regions of Japan, especially Hokkaido in the north – how far it all is from the big city environments that we more often associate with the country – with elements that take us back in time, too.
But the film’s central space remains the prison meeting-room in which the lawyers interview their client; the two sides are separated by a thick transparent screen which allows for strange degrees of close interaction between the two main protagonists when they face each other. In changing his version of events, is Misumi’s memory deceiving him, or is he playing with his lawyer, throwing out diversions from a motivation that may be anything but self-serving? First he uses a press interview to suggest he had committed his crime in collaboration with his victim’s widow as an insurance scam, then hints at much darker elements in that relationship between father and daughter. Kore-eda loosely links that latter element to Shigemori’s own circumstances – he’s divorced, and his relationship with his daughter has clearly been affected by his absorption in his work: the cycles and variations of parent and child relationships continue.
Questions and counter-questions arise as we circle the enigma of what may or may not be the truth. If it all seems something of a game, however macabre, for Misumi, Shigemori’s professional approach is equally ambiguous; as he suggests at one point, “legal strategy is the truth”. We certainly see a lot of legal strategy meetings – some include considerable atmospheric humour in the background – as well as more arcane conferences between judge and the defence and prosecution sides, but on the wider sense of who has the right to judge others, The Third Murder remains silent.
Visually the film reflects the story's interest in artifice. The widescreen cinematography of Kore-eda regular Takimoto Mikiya is darkly distinctive, especially when charting weather and landscapes. But it’s when he brings us into close-ups on the faces of the two main characters as they confront each other in that prison room that something uncanny happens, as their two images seem to merge in profile reflections in the perspex screen that separates them. It’s one of the most unsettling touches in a film that holds back far more than it reveals.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Third Murder
The mystery remains of why they keep tucking away The Good Fight on More4, as they did with its illustrious predecessor The Good Wife. No disrespect to 4’s ancillary channel – now seemingly the designated last resting place of Grand Designs – but it’s like hanging a sign on the door saying “niche viewing, please knock quietly before entering”.
Can the theatre be a courtroom? A good public place to debate morality and to arrive at profound decisions? You could answer this with a history lesson that ranges from the ancient Greeks to more recent tribunal plays in the 1960s and 1990s. But I’ll just concentrate on Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror, which premiered simultaneously in Berlin and Frankfurt in 2015 and now gets a British outing at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Rape is such a serious social issue that it’s hardly surprising that several recent plays have tackled it. I’m thinking of Gary Owen’s Violence and Son, James Fritz’s Four Minutes Twelve Seconds and Evan Placey’s Consensual. All of these discuss, whether implicitly or explicitly, the notion of consent, which is the name of playwright and director Nina Raine’s latest drama about the subject.
If you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumenau’s production of Craig Baxter’s play, based loosely around the Trollope novel of the same name and commissioned by the Trollope Society to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth, speeds through its two-hour-plus run, keeping a nimble crew of seven on its toes and the audience engaged in its ludic conspiracies.
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the studio where Court on Camera is about to air. A warm-up chappie who turns out to be the Usher (Wagnerian bass-baritone in training Martin Lamb) – on other Sundays it will be a lady – gauges our capacity to applaud and boo, and we’re off on a case of breach of promise of marriage as you never saw it before.
Shami Chakrabarti (b. 1969) is the director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, a position she famously and, some would say, fortuitously took up the day before 9/11. Raised in suburban north-west London, she became a barrister for the Home Office in the mid-Nineties. Regularly voicing her opinions on a multiplicity of current affairs programmes, notably Newsnight, she has spoken out on a huge number of issues, especially taking a stance against Britain’s “anti-terror” legislations.
Kevin Spacey is seen before he is heard in Clarence Darrow, the solo play that is doing a brief if ferociously bracing run at the Old Vic, but once the actor stops fiddling with his onstage desk and starts to talk, well, watch out. A master ironist who can often stand at an intriguingly cool distance from the parts he plays, Spacey hasn't sounded this impassioned in years, and when the standing ovation arrives nearly two hours later, it is entirely deserved.
And so we came to episode six, where all the plotlines that have been hovering like vultures since the opener came screaming down to beat the closing deadline. Would Clive Reader's career be terminated by the Bar Standards Board? How would Martha Costello cope with being manoeuvred into defending the evil Jody Farr? Could Shoe Lane Chambers ever prise themselves loose from the malign tentacles of solicitor Micky Joy?