[Last movie of the Viennale this year for me.]

Caterpillar is the newest film by Kôji Wakamatsu, starring Shinobu Terajima and Keigo Kasuya.

Plot:
During the Second Chino-Japanese War Tadashi (Keigo Kasuya) is brought home after losing not only all his limbs in the war, but also his voice and hearing, not to mention the severe burns he has. In his village he is celebrated as a war god for surviving but his wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) is horrified. After getting over the initial shock, though, she takes care diligently of Tadashi but their relationship is more than difficult.

It’s a tour de force to watch this film and I don’t think that it is worth it to put yourself through it, though it’s by no means a bad movie per se. It’s just that it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table.

I might have had my problems with this film also because I was expecting something else entirely. The (German) Viennale description talked about the relationship between Tadashi and Shigeko as being sado-masochistic and it is so not. It’s abusive and codependent, which is definitely not the same thing. And being thrown into a very direct movie about an abusive relationship without any kind of warning is not easy to take.

But this was only part of the exhausting nature of the film. The other part was that it tried to hammer home its message so insistently. And, let’s be honest, “war is bad” is not really a new concept that needs a lot of hammering. [Even though it’s of course a very important message.] The movie elaborates on how war makes victims of everyone, even the people at home, but by turning Tadashi and Shigeko into abusers themselves, takes away from that message immediately.

Both Keigo Kasuya and Shinobu Terajima are terrific actors and Wakamatsu uses them well. Kasuya has the more obvious challenging role, but it’s Terajima who really steals the show.

But it’s not enough to make this movie worthwhile. For that it’s too grating, not subtle enough and it just lacks some insight that we haven’t heard a million times before.

Summarising: Skip it. Unless you really, really, really like movies where you keep considering to walk out.