jandesimpson Review of Eureka

Eureka (2000)

Several days and films further on, I still cannot get this one out of my mind

[18 May 2003]

Every once in a while I have a cinematic experience so original and compelling that it dominates the days that follow to the virtual exclusion of all else. I have had such feelings twice in recent months from Japanese cinema, first with Koreeda's wondrous "After Life" and now with Aoyama's "Eureka". Not every film that affects me in this way is a masterpiece like "After Life". Some like "The Piano Teacher" melodramatically rely on their power to disturb. I suppose "Eureka" comes somewhere between, lacking perhaps the formal perfection of a recent masterwork such as the Vietnamese "At the Height of the Summer" but enveloping me in a way that I found far more engrossing. How else to explain two viewings on consecutive days of a film of enormous length (3.5 hours) that I was never once tempted to fast forward! The answer must lie partly in the mesmerizing power of the story it tells, partly with the involvement I feel with the characters and partly in the way the director has created a highly personal vision of a complete world. Basically "Eureka" is about the traumas of three survivors of a bus hijacking, the driver and a teenaged brother and sister pair of passengers, that has resulted in the massacre of all the others involved. After a prelude depicting the cathartic event that triggered their emotion turmoil we home into their lives two years further on. The bus driver, unable to find any resolution to his mental and physical state through involvement with his own family, seeks out the youngsters whose family life has been ruined with a view to expiating his guilt as a survivor by helping them in whatever way he can. Eventually he buys a bus on which they can embark on a journey possibly to escape what has happened to them, a journey with most of the odds stacked against it as he is in failing health, a parasitic intruder has to be taken on board in the form of the teenagers' basically unsympathetic cousin and their travels take place against a disturbing background of several killings of young women. Thus after nearly two hours into "Eureka" we are experiencing a road movie with a destination so hazily defined it is hard to believe it will ever be reached. Only two of the protagonists make it to a conclusion where the soft almost sepia-toned photography suddenly bursts into colour suggesting a transforming redemption. On a first viewing I was puzzled by the denouement of the serial killings which seemed psychologically if not physiologically outlandish but I have come to accept this as one tragic consequence of trauma in a masterly work that so successfully fuses elements of great films as diverse as "L'Avventura" and "Kings of the Road" with something of the singleminded gaze of that greatest of living directors, Theo Angelopoulos.