The narrative focuses on a group of students attending a suburban school in Tokyo and explores their lives in five days loosely situated between the pre-and post-typhoon periods. Rie, a popular student, has a strange connection with her male counterpart, Mikami. But both of them have unresolved mental health issues, Rie suffers from self-doubt while Mikami is bothered by dark and deep philosophical ideas of how one might transcend one’s species to overcome death itself. Midori, Yuri and Yasuko are three best friends but a bit more than friends. Michiko is a bothersome girl who attempts to control everybody in her surroundings, most notably Umemiya the mathematics teacher who is very relaxed and easy-going. Ken is a star player on the baseball team but is also deeply disturbed and walks around uttering, “Gomen nasai,” and “Tadaima”. Akira is the fool of the class, who gets into trouble on two occasions for trying to spy on girls instead of sitting in class.
When the girls throw a party at the school pool at night, wearing just their bathing suits, and dancing to music, they catch him spying that’s the first scene. The second one happens when he is already watching and is again seized while doing so, this time to two girls who are fucking.
Together with these mentions, there is a colorful plot surrounding the picture, and the poster of that scene where the furious mother of the female professor that Umemiya is dating, comes to the class and starts accusing him about the actions he did towards her daughter. Most of the key characters are now cornered in the school, as a result a lot of unpredictable things start to happen as they begin to struggle with the relation between each other and with even with themselves.
The film depicts school as an environment where teenagers get to understand life, philosophy, violence, sex, and love, but sometimes it becomes humorous. To Shinji Somai, humour is easier to grasp when exaggerating certain situations regarding teachers and parents. However, things start to change as the typhoon approaches and the circumstances get out of hand, leading to a much darker and realistic take, including scenes of rape, lesbian sex, and masturbation. For a more realistic conception of what these teenagers are going through, the typhoon really does materialize their issues alongside lingering in the metaphorical sense of the struggle to endure if one chooses to survive. To a certain extent, I felt the metaphysical shift in the film’s plot at the end of the movie was unusual, even though it wasn’t too annoying.
It is needless to state that Akihiro Itoh’s camera work is quite exquisite as he positions the viewers most of the film at the place where action seems taking place by zooming in from behind partly closed glasses and doors or zooming out from a distance. Moreover, he also captures long shots of the students dancing, some even clad in only underwear which in essence makes the film less vulgar than it could have otherwise been. Two shots were very memorable, one of each camera strategy. The first one was filmed from a distance to capture a glimpse of few girls attending to a student in the backyard while another parent loaned a student a sweater to keep warm all the while an overcast sky hovered ominously ready to unleash a storm signifying a more foreboding fire. The second one is of two girls removing their dresses on one side of the mirror while their third friend twirls around them in a breathtaking demonstration of the peeking shots.
In the 1970s composer Isao Tomita Wilson edited all the episodes together quite fast in the center of the feature film. I think the feature drags a bit at the end in the dancing scenes, which are rather long, even if the rock and reggae music that was chosen is very good.
The level of acting in the film is very high but Yuichi Mikami as “the philosopher” Mikami, Yuka Onishi who an obnoxious “Police woman” Michiko and Youki Kudoh Rie, maybe the most considered lost of all.
“Typhoon Club” has some deficiencies, which are rather common within Japanese cinema, such as the unnecessary overextending of the scenes and surrealism that one cannot avoid, but on the other hand, it is a perfect example of how the Japanese do (school) drama. The movie is very good and interesting.
For More Movies Like Typhoon Club (1985) Visit solarmovie
