Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Makoto Nagahisa
Starring: Nana Mori, Aoi Yamada, Ryosuke Sota, Leona Hirota, Wataru Ichinose
Westerners like to patronisingly portray Japan as an innocent land with no crime or anti-social behaviour, where everyone gets along. Of course, the truth is that Japan has its share of social issues like anywhere else. With Japanese society built so heavily on conformity, it's all too easy for outsiders to fall through the cracks, and the country has a recent phenomenon of citizens voluntarily becoming homeless because they simply can't fit within the rigid parameters of Japan's social order.
Nowhere is this more explicit than the "Tōyoko kids," teenage runaways who live on the streets of Tokyo's Shinjuku district. Drugs and prostitution are rife among these youngsters, cordoned off from the rest of the city by blue plastic barriers.
Makoto Nagahisa's Burn is a Tokyo cousin of gritty New York movies like Midnight Cowboy, The Panic in Needle Park and Heaven Knows What, following Jurie (Nana Mori), a teenage girl who flees her abusive home and is taken in by a group of misfit Tōyoko kids. Like the young title character of the recent Taiwanese drama Left-Handed Girl, Jurie is an unfortunate victim of superstition. Believing her stutter is a sign of her bad character, her father spent his life attempting to beat it out of her. Even more cruelly, he exercised a form of "collective punishment," also beating Jurie's younger sister for her perceived sins. With the old man now passed away, Jurie's mother has taken up his belt and carried on the punishment.
When Jurie seizes the will to flee, she makes her way to Shinjuku. There she meets a group of homeless teens who give her the nickname "Ju-Ju." They don't do so to mock her stutter, but rather to accommodate it. For the first time in her life, Jurie feels like she belongs.
Of course, living on the streets is no utopia, and it's not long before Jurie falls into prostitution, egged on by her new friend Mitsuba (Aoi Yamada), who shows her how quickly money can be accumulated in this way. Jurie sets a target in her mind that she sets out to reach, with the plan of rescuing her kid sister when she has enough funds to look after her.
It would be wrong to label Burn "misery porn," as it is clear that Nagahisa has an empathy for these kids that he wishes to translate to his audience. We do feel empathy, and sympathy for this lot - how could we not? - but we never really get to know them beyond their suffering. There is something counter-productive in how heavily Jurie is defined by her stutter. She is portrayed as a capital V victim throughout, a punching bag for this bleak narrative.
After a while the litany of abuse becomes too much to bear, and the movie fails to make any substantial point beyond the obvious thought that no kid should have to live like this. It has no more depth than a 1970s after school special, and the characters are just as thinly sketched. Burn unfortunately plays like it was made to scare kids away from the runaway lifestyle rather than to criticise the society that compels youngsters to drop out in such an extreme manner. Nagahisa's background in music videos serves to distract from the central drama with bullet time theatrics and offbeat angles adding nothing of value.
There is a curiosity and shock value that compels for a while, and a non-Japanese audience will watch much of Burn with a mix of outrage and incredulity. The sight of adult men haggling with underage prostitutes in broad daylight on busy city streets will cancel any naive notions of Japan as a utopian society. Such moments are captured with a docudrama distance, as though the actors are interacting with unsuspecting members of the public ala Borat or Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, but you'll likely come away wishing you had watched a documentary on the subject of Tōyoko kids rather than this well-intentioned but superficial drama.
