Swallowtail (film)

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Swallowtail
Swallowtail Butterfly Poster.jpg
Directed by Shunji Iwai
Produced by Shinya Kawai
Written by Shunji Iwai
Starring Hiroshi Mikami,
Chara,
Ayumi Ito
Yōsuke Eguchi
Andy Hui
Atsuro Watabe
Music by Takeshi Kobayashi
Cinematography Noboru Shinoda
Distributed by Kadokawa Herald
Release date
  • September 14, 1996 (1996-09-14)
Running time
 148 minutes
Language Japanese
English
Mandarin

Swallowtail, also known as Swallowtail Butterfly (スワロウテイル Suwarōteiru), is a 1996 Japanese crime film directed by Shunji Iwai, starring Hiroshi Mikami, pop-singer Chara, and Ayumi Ito.

Shunji Iwai Japanese film director

Shunji Iwai is a Japanese film director, video artist, writer and documentary maker.

Hiroshi Mikami is a Japanese actor. He starred in the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2004. In 2015, he also features on a song from the album Vitium by Japanese band Sukekiyo.

Contents

The film was shot on hand-held cameras using jump cuts and other visual techniques. [1] It covers a wide array of themes and genres, from social realism to coming-of-age to crime.

Jump cut cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject give the impression of a jump forward in time

A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly if at all. This type of edit gives the effect of jumping forwards in time. It is a manipulation of temporal space using the duration of a single shot, and fracturing the duration to move the audience ahead. This kind of cut abruptly communicates the passing of time as opposed to the more seamless dissolve heavily used in films predating Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, when jump cuts were first used extensively. For this reason, jump cuts, while not seen as inherently bad, are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing. Jump cuts, in contrast, draw attention to the constructed nature of the film.

A theme song for the film under Yen Town Band, titled "Swallowtail Butterfly (Ai no Uta)", gained first place on the Oricon Weekly Singles Chart of October 7, 1996. [2]

Swallowtail Butterfly (Ai no Uta) 1996 single by Chara

"Swallowtail Butterfly " is a song by Chara, released under the name Yen Town Band. It was the lead single from Montage, a concept album released for the Shunji Iwai film Swallowtail Butterfly that also starred Chara. This song was used as the theme song for the film.

Oricon Inc., established in 1999, is the holding company at the head of a Japanese corporate group that supplies statistics and information on music and the music industry in Japan. It started as Original Confidence Inc., which was founded by Sōkō Koike in November 1967 and became known for its music charts. Oricon Inc. was originally set up as a subsidiary of Original Confidence and took over the latter’s Oricon record charts in April 2002.

Plot

The film is set in Tokyo at an unspecified point in the near future when the Japanese yen has become the strongest currency in the world. This attracts an influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, to work in the city. The immigrants give the city the nickname Yen Town(円都,en to). The Japanese natives, however, despise the nickname, and in retribution call the immigrants by the homophone Yen Thieves(円盗,en tou), anglicised as "Yentowns" in the film's English subtitles. [3]

Japanese yen Official currency of Japan

The yen is the official currency of Japan. It is the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the pound sterling.

Immigration Movement of people into another country or region to which they are not native

Immigration is the international movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens, or to take up employment as a migrant worker or temporarily as a foreign worker.

The story centers around a sixteen-year-old girl (Ito) whose mother has just died. The girl is passed on from person to person until she is taken in by a Chinese Yentown prostitute named Glico (Chara), who names her Ageha (Japanese for swallowtail). Under Glico's care, Ageha starts a new life.

Prostitution in Japan

Prostitution in Japan has existed throughout the country's history. While the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956 states that "No person may either do prostitution or become the customer of it", loopholes, liberal interpretations and loose enforcement of the law have allowed the sex industry to prosper and earn an estimated 2.3 trillion yen per year.

Swallowtail butterfly family of insects

Swallowtail butterflies are large, colorful butterflies in the family Papilionidae, and include over 550 species. Though the majority are tropical, members of the family inhabit every continent except Antarctica. The family includes the largest butterflies in the world, the birdwing butterflies of the genus Ornithoptera.

The immigrant characters, who speak Japanese, English, Mandarin, or Cantonese, earn their living by committing petty crimes and engaging in prostitution. Ageha does not participate in any of these activities, but is protected by Glico and the other immigrants. The film does not make clear whether Ageha is Japanese or an Asian immigrant. [3]

Eventually, due to a sudden twist of fate, the immigrants are given a chance to realize their various dreams. But in doing so, they destroy their solidarity, and have to face their problems separately.

Cast

Awards

Swallowtail Butterfly was also nominated for but did not win the following awards:

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References

  1. ↑ Cazdyn, Eric (2002). The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN   0-8223-2912-3.
  2. ↑ "オリコンさん 1996年".
  3. 1 2 Yomota, Inuhiko (2003). "Stranger Than Tokyo: Space and Race in Postnational Japanese Cinema". In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN   1-56639-985-8.
  4. ↑ "20th Moscow International Film Festival (1997)". MIFF. Archived from the original on 2013-03-22. Retrieved 2013-03-22.
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