In the sleepy coastal town of Uobuka, the statue of a googly-eyed green sea monster named Nororo towers over a precipice. According to legend, Nororo is an evil presence from the sea and whoever looks into its eyes will be damned. In ancient times, annual sacrifices were made every year during Uobuka’s own Nororo Festival — two villagers would be chosen to jump off the cliff; one would be saved, while the other would sink and drown.
This slice of Japanese folklore is merely an appetizer for the real bizarreness to come in The Scythian Lamb, the latest film by Daihachi Yoshida, which won the prestigious Kim Ji-seok award at last year’s Busan International Film Festival. Based on a manga by Tatsuhiko Yamagami and Mikio Igarashi, this offbeat black comedy is a fine blend of droll humor, drama and romance spread out across a substantial 126-minutes running time.
Tsukisue (Ryo Nishikido) is a city official in charge of a new government resettlement project that grants parole to low-risk prisoners in Uobuka, a coastal town known for its “nice people” and “great seafood.” If these prisoners stay here for 10 years, their sentences will be reduced, and they will be free to go. Tsukisue’s boss believes it is an effective way to kill two birds with one stone: not only will it curtail public costs of keeping inmates, the injection of new blood will simultaneously fight the problem of rapid depopulation in Japan’s rural towns.
photo courtesy of Far East Film Festival
It is soon discovered that these six prisoners, in fact, were convicted of murder, and it’s up to Tsukisue to ensure that their true identities remain concealed to the general townsfolk. But it doesn’t take long before a body washes up on Uobuka, and Tsukisue begins to doubt the seemingly reformed ways of the new residents.
Yoshida continues his trademark of whimsical genre hybrids with The Scythian Lamb, though his latest feature is considerably toned down compared to previous works such as The Kirishima Thing.
We are introduced to a colorful, motley crew of flawed characters, including the likes of jittery barber Fukumoto (Shingo Mizusawa), who slit his ex-boss’s throat with a razor, the sexy Ota (Yuka), who finds love again in Tsukisue’s elderly father, former Yakuza member Ono (Min Tanaka), the questionable Sugiyama (Kazuki Kitamura) and the courteous and placid Miyakoshi (Ryuhei Matsuda), who begins dating Tsukisue’s surly crush Aya (Fumino Kimura).
photo courtesy of Far East Film Festival
For a bunch of stock prisoners defined by the same cold-blooded crime, Yoshida has done well to craft distinctive personalities for each individual, alongside humanistic backstories capable of inducing pathos. With that, it’s even more of a pity that equal character development is not followed through across the board — the terrific Mikako Ichikawa is sorely underused as an ex-victim of relationship abuse, and a recluse who buries dead animals in the soil of her backyard.
Buoyed by a rock soundtrack with bewitching guitar riffs, The Scythian Lamb unfolds with an unhurried pace that often lulls the audience into a false sense of security before the rug is pulled out from underneath. Tonal shifts are skilfully executed, with dramatic tension ratcheted up in the second half of the film, alongside bouts of chilling violence dished out in a casual, low-key fashion.
Drawing on elements of an animal fable, The Scythian Lamb refers to the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a zoophyte believed to grow sheep as its fruit. The sheep were connected to a plant by an umbilical cord, and once they had finished grazing on the surrounding greens, both sheep and plant would perish.
Some interesting questions about the mutability of human nature and the deceptiveness of appearances are also raised: Can a leopard really change its spots? Should we grant second chances to sinners? Does karma really exist?
The omnipresence of Nororo and the exploration of the rituals in a small-town festival further ground the narrative in the mystical and mundane, creating an intriguing world far detached from reality.
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