Revolution+1

Revolution+1, from writer-director Masao Adachi (co-written with Junichi Inoue), takes an appropriately raw approach when recounting the motivations behind the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Soran Tamoto stars as Tatsuya Kawakami, a fictionalised, feedback-haunted version of real-life suspect Tatsuya Yamagami, a middle-aged loner brimming with grievance. You see, Kawakami's father committed suicide and left a successful construction business to his wife and young family, the former of which squandered this nest egg on donations to the Unification Church, a South Korean religious movement that, Kawakami repeatedly reminds us, demands its Japanese adherents live in poverty. This ascetic lifestyle intended as punishment and reparation for the atrocities committed by their home country during the Second World War. In Adachi's film - the director a veteran of experimental documentary filmmaking, softcore pornography, and a former member of the Japanese Red Army based out of Lebanon - Tatsuya Kawakami is presented as an unloved middle child, desperate but apparently unable to make a real, emotional connection with an indifferent mother, played by Satoko Iwasaki. 

Kawakami's mother, who is viewed entirely from the lead subject's aggrieved and icy perspective, is an equally cold even robotic woman, entirely focused on creating a life lived in gruelling penance. This self-mortification extends beyond herself, thwarting Tetsuya's academic aspirations and denying his older, deeply unhappy brother the lymphoma treatment he so desperately needed. As the film begins winding down, with Kawakami readying himself to blast Abe with a homemade shotgun that (disappointingly) this file-shared film does very little to explain the practicalities of, the soon-to-be assassin rents a pleasant car with the last of his life savings and drives to meet his mother. Although it isn't immediately revealed as such, Kawakami imagines a brief interlude in which he is able to approach and even impress his mother with this shiny new purchase. In Tatsuya's fantasies the two enjoy a rapport, his remaining parent eager to dispense with her mindless manual labour and spend the rest of the afternoon with her child. No sooner are things looking up for Kawakami than we are rudely ejected back to reality: Tatsuya sat in his car ignored and alone; watching his frail mother toil from an abashed distance. Adachi's film ruling then that for all of Kawakami's talk of Japanese nationalism or the hypocrisy of highly visible state actors who drum up business for parasitic churches, perhaps what this gunman really (dearly) hoped for was an ability to stake some claim on his mother's attention.