Iwai captures vividly the feeling of being nowhere and everywhere at once as his chaotic, genre-blending work of linguistic pluralism explores marginalised lives chasing their rags-to-riches story in an alternative-future Japan.
Review #2,943
Dir. Shunji Iwai
1996 | Japan | Drama | 148min | 1.66:1 | Japanese, English & Mandarin
Not rated – likely to be M18 for violence, some nudity, coarse language and some disturbing scenes
Cast: Ayumi Ito, Yosuke Eguchi, Chara, Hiroshi Mikami, Andy Hui Chi-On
Plot: After a young girl’s mother dies, she is cared for by Glico, a brassy hooker, who gives the girl the name “Ageha” (Butterfly). Ageha goes to work for a collection of oddballs who run a junkyard and salvage business.
Awards: Official Selection (Venice)
Source: Nippon Herald Films
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Marginalised Communities; Survival & Support
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
Only my second Shunji Iwai film after All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), Swallowtail Butterfly, is another fascinating journey into the tumultuous lives of characters living on society’s margins.
Despite the harsh reality, they each harbour hopes and dreams of overcoming, perhaps transcending, their present circumstances. Some do, albeit barely; others don’t.
We are in Yentown, a place where Yentowns live. They live transiently in slum-like locales that have sprung on the outskirts of a bustling metropolis in an alternative-future Japan.
Outcast and discriminated against, many aren’t Japanese. Hence, there is a smattering use of different languages (e.g. English, Mandarin, Japanese, etc.) in Iwai’s work of linguistic pluralism, which is one of its many interesting aspects.
Everyone’s chasing the yen, a currency that promises one rags-to-riches story after another. Whether through prostitution, drug trading or counterfeiting money, Iwai’s characters resort to the often nasty and violent tactics of lowly criminals and gangsters.
“You die and your spirit rises to the sky, but as soon as it touches a cloud it turns into rain. So nobody’s ever seen heaven.”
It is this world—and what incredible world-building by Iwai through his naturalistic, realist hand-held style—that we find ourselves embedded inside, much like the titular butterfly tattoo that is etched into the skin of one or more characters.
Ageha (Ayumi Ito in one of those shy, innocent performances) is our eyes and ears as a fish out of the water, forced into uncertain scenarios where she must play it smart—or die as a nobody.
While occasionally overlong (also a ‘problem’ of Lily Chou-Chou), Swallowtail Butterfly largely engages because it is such a chaotic film as Iwai mixes genres from action, black comedy, coming-of-age, B-movie horror and campy music.
The film doesn’t care whether the motley concoction works or not, but it somehow does, pulled together as a sum that is more than its disparate parts.
It ultimately expresses a vivid sense of being displaced yet being ‘at home in the world’ at the same time—a state of being nowhere and everywhere, existing ephemerally like a neo-butterfly that has just shed its caterpillaristic past.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 