As someone who dabbles in reselling myself — albeit of on-the-level vinyl records, not suspiciously cheap “designer” goods — the scenario outlined in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film Cloud (Criterion Premieres, $23.96 Blu-ray, $19.96 DVD) is the stuff of nightmares.
Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who initially works in a garment factory by day, entered the world of online reselling as a side hustle for its “easy money.” He tracks trending products, sniffs out bargains and manipulates shopkeepers into unloading their entire inventory at a fraction of the price. Perhaps most importantly, he’s unscrupulous about bootlegs and knockoffs, pleading ignorance and shifting the burden onto the consumer. His online argot is the language of the snake oil salesman: On an eBay-like platform, he lists obscure mechanical consoles, purchased in bulk drastically south of wholesale prices, as “miraculous therapy devices.” They fly off the e-shelves at 200,000 yen apiece.
But one can only swindle an unsuspecting public so many times before some of said public band together to do something about it, despite Yoshii’s carefully maintained online anonymity. It doesn’t take Anonymous to dox someone anymore, and the second half of Cloud charts the fallout when a handful of his victims abscond with the crooked opportunist, with the intent to live-stream his torture for the many others he’s wronged.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Free of violence, the first half of Cloud plays as a fascinating commentary on what might be called the Japanese Dream, its particulars so similar to the American strive for self-determination, one bootstrap at a time. Despite being singled out for a promotion by his boss at the factory, Yoshii quits his unfulfilling job, exiting the rat race — in a haunting bit of foreshadowing early on, he spots a dead rat crumpled in newspaper on the steps toward his home — to pursue his passion for reselling full-time.
He even relocates from his cramped apartment in Tokyo to a giant lakeside property in a rural town, all the better to house his growing inventory, despite his girlfriend Akiko’s (Kotone Furukawa) misgivings. The picture Cloud paints is of the liberation from drudgery of the old salaryman from so many Yasujiro Ozu films into a future of unlimited economic independence and domestic tranquility. All it takes is an aptitude for gaming the system.
Kurosawa, who knows a thing or two about building psychological suspense in a filmography of unnerving thrillers that dates back across some 40 titles, allows Yoshii’s comeuppance to unfold with patience, attention to detail and the occasional effective jump scare. His camera often adopts a voyeuristic posture even when nobody’s watching Yoshii, laying the groundwork for the home invasion and kidnapping to come.
Much of the rest of Cloud is set an abandoned warehouse, where Yoshii’s antagonists, including some familiar faces from the first half of the movie, plan to enact their vengeance. But for this gang that can’t shoot straight, revenge is a dish best served clumsy. This isn’t to say the carnage and gunplay are presented as comedy; far from it. With rounds exchanged between characters who have never held a firearm, much less pulled its trigger, the action is filmed with a brutally awkward realism that is fundamentally un-movielike.
If the gritty setting and its attendant collapse of best-laid plans suggest Reservoir Dogs, Cloud’s tonal antecedent is not Tarantino but Sam Peckinpah. I thought of the mournful fatalism of The Wild Bunch, and Kurosawa, in an enlightening interview attached to the Criterion disc, cites Straw Dogs as a formative influence on the film. Both are spottable in the messy and un-heroic final act, which turns the romantic “satisfaction” of action cinema on its head. Instead of a John Woo-style pistol opera that glories in bullets, fast cuts and a barrage of sound, Kurosawa lingers on the squirming discomfort of his gunfights, cutting only when necessary and letting a spartan soundtrack of grunts, moans and unsteady footfalls echo through the industrial setting.
Ultimately, Cloud, which Japan selected as its Best International Feature Film entry at last year’s Academy Awards, is every bit the dark-satirical equal of a much buzzier recent release, Park Chan-wook’s anticapitalist polemic No Other Choice. A corroded examination of the pursuit of personal happiness and career fulfillment at the expense of everyone but oneself, Cloud offers few characters worth cheering for. But as a microcosm for an economy of rapacity and selfishness, its piercing accuracy crosses seas and borders. An American remake would write itself.