Director Daihachi Yoshida talks about Tokyo Film Fest competition entry Teki Cometh

In its deliberate pacing and thoughtfulness, Daihachi Yoshida’s new film Teki is coming is characteristic of the Japanese filmmaker’s career. The film, which will have its world premiere in Tokyo 2024. International Film Festival, competing in the festival’s main competition, is another literary adaptation from a director who is an avid reader.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, bookstores were closed, so I reread the books I had. One of those was Teki (title of the original book and movie in Japanese, meaning enemy). Since people all over the world couldn’t go out and meet other people, it was kind of like everyone living an elderly lifestyle like the main character in the story,” recalls Yoshida, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter the day of the Tokyo festival poster announcement.

Literary adaptations have proven incredibly fruitful for Yoshida. After two decades of making advertisements, music videos, short films and television series, he made his film debut with Funuke show some love, losers! in 2007, which was based on the novel by Yukiko Motoya. The film earned him national acclaim and an invitation to Cannes Critics’ Week. But he’s probably best known internationally for the quirky 2012 high school drama. The Kirishima Thingbased on a novel by Ryo Asai. That movie got Yoshida. JapanAcademy of Awards for best film and director, as well as an unusually long theatrical career. Two years later, pale moonbased on a novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta, was in the main competition in Tokyo.

In Teki is comingA film adaptation of a book by celebrated Japanese novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, the protagonist, played by Kyozo Nagastuka, is a retired professor of French literature who gives occasional guest lectures and plans his own ending based on when he will run out of money. Old friends and former students come to visit. During one of his rare excursions, he meets an attractive young French literature student played by Yumi Kawai, recently seen in the Netflix series. Extremely inappropriate. The monochrome cinematography evokes times gone by and the lines of reality and imagination are blurred.

“I had a completely different reaction to the book than when I first read it in my thirties, and I read it again as I approached my 60s,” Yoshida says. “I was aware that I was getting older and had experienced the death of several people close to me, and that I would not live another 40 or 50 years. “It lit a spark in me and I started thinking about how I would do it if I filmed this.”

After writing the script, Yoshida showed it to the book’s prolific and sometimes outspoken author, Tsutsui, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday a few days before the festival press conference. Tsutsui gave his blessing, emphasizing only that the story is not about dementia and that the protagonist actively throws himself into his fantasies.

Veteran actor Nagatsuka studied and worked in France in his youth. While there, he appeared as a Chinese general in a French comedy (The Chinois in Paris) largely due to being one of the few East Asians in Paris in the early 1970s, but it sparked his interest in acting. However, the French connection with Teki is coming It’s simply a coincidence, according to Yoshida.

“The reason I photographed in black and white was because no one stopped me,” he says with a smile. “That still doesn’t explain why. I thought monochrome had an understated feel that suited the main character’s quiet and somewhat stoic life. But when I shot the film, I felt that it has a “rich” quality that maximizes the imagination of the viewer, including me. So now I want to ask people who make color films why they choose to do it.”

Multiple scenes of food and coffee preparation set the pace of the protagonist’s existence, but Yoshida had resigned himself to the fact that food wouldn’t look as appetizing without color.

“But the staff in charge of the kitchen were so talented that I thought it looked delicious even though it was in black and white, and while editing the film I got very, very hungry.”

As with the division between fantasy and the real world, the nature of the title’s mysterious “enemy” is left somewhat ambiguous.

“It is an enemy of the north, which historically for the Japanese would mean Russia. However, the main character’s enemies can easily be interpreted as death or old age. But as I was making the film I realized that everyone, regardless of their age, has enemies, and they can be defined as a goal, a difficulty to face or a reason to live. I think it is one of the necessary elements for all human beings.”