BEAUTIFUL STAR

A Family of Aliens Rushes to Earth’s Rescue

Venue(s): Uplink
July 19 (Wed), 2017: 20:40
Language: Japanese with English subtitles.
Official website: http://gaga.ne.jp/hoshi/
Theater website: uplink.co.jp/
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tkQFT7xaZs
Tariff: General: ¥1,800 / Colleage Students: ¥1,100 (¥1,500 Sat/Sun/holidays) / H.S. Students: ¥800 / Seniors: ¥1,100 / Members: ¥1,000

Title: 美しい星 (Utsukushii Hoshi)
Director: Daihachi Yoshida (吉田大八)
Duration: 127 min

There is so much to say about Daihachi Yoshida’s new sci-fi tragicomedy, but so little time to write it, given the sudden announcement about this one-off screening.

So let us give you the briefest of rundowns, and recommend that you reschedule all previously laid plans for July 19, so you can be at Shibuya’s Uplink for the one-time-only English-subtitled showing.

A Beautiful Star is based on the Cold War-set novel Utsukushii Hoshi by Yukio Mishima, about a family of aliens who are trying to decide whether they should terminate the human race. It was published in 1962 and oddly, given the author’s global fame, has been translated only into Swedish and Chinese. Mishima’s translator, Donald Keene, apparently disliked it so much that he declined.

Yoshida (Pale Moon, The Kirishima Thing) brings a decidedly contemporary we’re-all-doomed sensibility to this tale about the Osugi family, whose members come to realize (or believe, whichever way you choose to interpret it) that they are from different planets. While the kids, bike messenger Kazuo (Kazuya Kamenashi of Vancouver Asahi) and college student Akiko (Ai Hashimoto of Parks) struggle to come to grips with their apparent origins on Mercury and Venus, their TV weatherman father (Lily Franky of Like Father, Like Son), suddenly begins making prophetically apocalyptic announcements on air. Only their mother (Tomoko Nakajima of Tokyo Family), who joins a pyramid scheme to hawk water with miraculous healing properties, seems to be an Earthling… although maybe she’s from Jupiter.

As the Osugis grapple with their new missions and fraught relationships with other extraterrestrials on earth, it never becomes clear exactly why humans are being punished. Is it that we’ve pushed our beautiful planet to the very brink of environmental disaster? Or that we’re moving inexorably toward nuclear obliteration? Or is it something else altogether? Yoshida clearly wants us to work it out for ourselves.

Uplink