Darky and Stormy Japanese thriller Cloud is an excellent exploration of a market powered by greed
Cloud follows Ryosuke Yoshii, a factory worker who operates moonlight as a gray market online who operates owners of small companies.Movies that we like/delivered
Cloud
Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
With the leading role Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa and Daiken Okudaira
Classification N / a; 124 minutes
Open In selected theaters, including the Tiff Lightbox in Toronto, July 18
Critic’s Pick
Buy low, sales high can be the mantra of Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker in Tokyo whose off-hours are spent in the gray market world of online resale, and whose struggles are the focus of the excellent new thriller Cloud. But the economic rule can also apply to Cloud‘s own writer director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
If you bought the stock in the filmmaker during his early, perhaps more notorious days working in the Japanese pink film and V-cinema-genres (essentially, direct-to-video erotic thrillers and yakuza flicks), you would be a rich cinephile, given that Kurosawa is now widely.
After having spent in recent years with experimenting with historical drama (2020s Wife of a spy) and French -speaking cinema (last year’s remake of Serpent’s path), Kurosawa centimeter back in the direction of the knotted time of his horror classics Healing (1997) and Pulse (2001) with CloudThis time it is accentuated with a healthy morbid sense of humor. And, perhaps even more surprising, a serious affinity for action film-shoot-outs of action films.
The title “Cloud” probably refers to the digital storage infrastructure on which Yoshii trusts his moonlight performance, a little retail rigage where owners of small companies are exploited by buying their wares (sometimes legitimate, sometimes false) in bulk and then selling it on an eBay-like website for an important marking.
But the title of the film can just as well refer to the ever -ominous environment that surrounds Yoshii. As soon as he leaves his 9-to-5 job and his growing resale operation from Tokyo and the countryside moved to the countryside, girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) follows dutifthrouw-the shades of the life of Yoshii start becoming considerably too dark.
The film gets dark when Yoshii leaves his daily job and goes to the countryside with his wife to accommodate his growing resale company.Movies that we like/delivered
In the beginning it is difficult to determine some changes and when. Is the turning point when Yoshii hires a suspicious enthusiastic assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira)? Or maybe when Yoshii has an unfriendly run-in with a local police officer after an apparently random act of vandalism on his national property? Kurosawa calls the fear up slowly and steadily, until Yoshii finds itself the target of the most dissatisfied customers in the world.
When Kurosawa asks his audience to empathize with Yoshii, he has a funny way to do it. Motivated only because of the amount of yen on his bank account, the character is difficult to root. But again, his injured customers are powered by their own filthy, selfish desires – the criminals have successfully spent unknown hours the real identity of Yoshii, but wear masks to protect their own.
Due to the spooky final of the film-a bowel-punch moment of settlement that follows almost half an hour entertaining amateurist gunplay-being the feelings of Kurosawa about the current state of e-commerce clearly. Or vary or supplierCapitalism is full of comments.
