How to make a film using Sean McAllister’s tried and perfected method:
1. Head to a hostile environment to report on an important political issue
2. Brutally collide camera lens with your topic head on
3. Realise your subject is a victim sprawled open for examination, like a bug in a petri dish, divorced from the context of its being and devoid of individual detail
4. Become depressed and think you’re losing your way with no human narrative to grasp onto, as you drink and talk your frustrations through at night with a bar fixture
5. Leave, and almost give up on the facade of making a film, until you understand the one who propped you up with their near-immunity to the surrounding scenario is the one you must return to
6. Stake down your claim on this surviving social misfit whose eyes dance above a slouching spine, and attach yourself fast for the next 6 months
7. Question the basics until they laugh and reveal their seams
8. Spot the potential drama of their destiny, and divine it
Again, Sean McAllister has cast the most charismatic of characters, in another free-spirited hero, at odds with his society and expected role. Welcome to Naoki and the class of working poor in Japan.
Japan: A Story of Love and Hate was difficult to make, as the confessional and controversial jogging journey dialogue at the start lays testimony to. Misunderstood, misdirected and mistreating his own health, Sean saw the unrealistic expectations for social face, warped work ethics and high suicide statistics, yet was locked out of the society and could not access any emotional theme; he was running in circles with no viable entry to the core for years. The breakthrough was Naoki, an ex-bar owner, an ex-home owner, an ex-brand-new-BMW-paid-in-cash-in-full owner, with ex-wives, and no conceivable assets or family of his own any more. Naoki was living in a capitalist Japanese hell, and provided Sean with a golden ticket into the madness demonstrated so aptly and absurdly with the show of communal exercises done at Naoki’s place of work every morning. The insurance collection officers gather on command to raise their arms in an uninspired union of circles. “It was like watching communism parade as capitalism,” a poignant point in Sean’s stylistic commentary.
The limitation of most films about Japan is their tendency to exoticise, as they paint beautiful portraits of individuals and isolation. In contrast, Sean does not merely show social anomie, but manages to slip inside, sit on the marital bed and split open the shadow hiding the man. This is quite a feat, and part of a poetic quote from near the end of the film that demonstrates Sean’s special skill at building a rapport, and pulling out the essence in people who willingly hold up their arms in delight to be got, at last. Ignored and scorned by society, but legal never the less, they stamp down their foot and maintain their right to be themselves, yet tragically have no one around who wants to see them truly. Like Samir and Kevin in previous films, Naoki marches to his own tune, and once he recognises and accepts that Sean can sense his capacity for living emotionally not rationally, he willing hands over his personality and future.
Naoki lives in a pill-popping, feeling-suppressing society, sharing a partnership and connection only with Yoshie, who is too tired to talk because she’s paid to hear the surface woes of customers rejected by their own wives through convention. Collective customs and rituals over bear individual desires. And here is where a lesser documentary maker would be pulled up and out for intervening and meddling in the development of life playing out. For Sean helps implement change. But not in a manipulative way, and not in an excessive-access-to-unrealistic-resources way. He operates like a friend, offering an ear to hear talk of how it is, and press for how it may be. He dissects relationships, to prompt his protagonists to locate the veins, and ensure their survival, if that is wanted and needed. Which is admirable, and also makes for a proper narrative arc in the film. We get a dramatically satisfying ending that extends the scope of the story, which is great and rare for a documentary that also offers subtle access to a closed and complex political context.
