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The Guys from Paradise
Additional Language: Japanese
Year of Release: 2000
Director: Miike Takashi
Screenwriters: Izō Hashimoto & Itaru Era
(From the novel Tengoku Kara Kita Otoko-tachi by Hayashi Yōji)
Producers: Asahi National Broadcasting Co., Excellent Film, Hammers
Cast: Kikkawa Kōji, Yamazaki Tsutomu, Endō Kenichi, Okina Kaei, Muzahashi Kenji, Kanayama Kazuhiko, Ōtsuka Nene, Oikawa Mai, Monsour del Rosario, Kitami Toshiyuki, Oikawa Mitsuhiro, Sako Hideo, Takenaka Naoto, Pocholo Montes, King Gutierrez, Jess Lapid, Kaye Tuano, Joey Galvez, Levy Ignacio, Oikawa Mai, Kanayama Kazuhiko, Kitami Toshiyuki, Rene Hawkins, Vic Felipe, Lindsay Kennedy, Efren Reyes Jr., Boy Roque, Rey Bejar, Alex Cunanan, Jun Dauz, Alex Braquit, Cris Daluz, Aileen Joy, Sonny Cabalda, Leo Valdez, Philip Supnet, Noe Endaya, Shaina Miguel, Jazi Cruz, Jane Perez, Abby Moscaidon, Bobit Dominguez, Sammy Bernabe, Miyamoto Seiya, Shojima Takeshi, Sako Hideo
Hayasake Kohei, a salaryman of Sanyu Trading, is caught with a kilogram’s worth of heroin and incarcerated in Manila City Jail, where he gets to know a small group of Japanese prisoners. Yoshida, who says he fled Japan after killing some gangsters, hires Kohei to represent him in business transactions, which they accomplish by bribing the guards so they can get around outside. Kohei absconds with Yoshida’s money but when he gets to his hotel, his wife’s no longer in his room. Yoshida finds him and warns him not to trick him again. Kohei realizes his wife and his lawyer are cheating on him so he dismisses them both. He then decides to use the money he left with a Filipino chef who runs a Japanese restaurant, but when the chef discovers that the package contains money, he flees with it. A pedophile inmate drugs Kohei and attempts to sell him to organ harvesters but Yoshida saves him. When a prison riot erupts with the inmates ganging up on the Japanese, a Philippine prisoner whom Yoshida cheated helps them escape. While driving away, they see a child crying over her injured mother; they take her to her village, where Sakamoto uses his medical knowledge to treat her.
Casual film observers might be delighted to find out that one of Japan’s major film talents elected to adopt the only novel written by his compatriot, which happened to be Pinas-set, and devoted his impressive influence to make it happen. Hard-core followers of Miike Takashi, however, might be in for a disappointment, if they hadn’t heard about The Guys from Paradise yet (an unlikely possibility). It has none—actually a few, which might as well be counted as nothing—of the incessant, viscerally horrific, sometimes outright cartoonish violence that made his fan favorites so slavishly venerated: Audition and Dead or Alive (both 1999) and Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer (both 2001), to name just a few. The primary distinction that TGfP shares with the general run of Miike films is the role that irony plays in the narrative; in fact, irony in the film takes precedence over violence, so much so that when violence finally makes its appearance, it still operates on the principle of reversal. These irruptions initially cause perplexity, particularly with Kohei, the lead character, who winds up regarding them as lessons he has to learn in order to survive. The first definitive sign that developments will refuse to follow normal logic is when Kohei witnesses a prison riot: the sounds are recognizable from any other city-jail film, but the participants all seem to be enjoying themselves, delighting in what is after all a departure from the monotony of regimented existence, just as, on a later occasion, a thunderstorm makes everyone rejoice in the rare opportunity to have a clean shower. Yoshida, the gang leader, makes fun of the trans woman whom he regards as maid and mistress, but mourns for the only time in the film when she dies trying to save him. Sakamoto, who was arrested for child rape, cures the mother of a girl who calls for help, and selflessly uses his indispensable medical expertise on her townmates. At the point of no return, when the Japanese prisoners are menacingly surrounded by the rest of the inmates, Brando, the singular Filipino prisoner with an axe to grind against Yoshida, saves them in the surest way possible, by scattering money that the other prisoners hasten to collect. The final narrative irony might be impossible to accept, even if the film already dropped broad hints from the very beginning that Miike would be subsuming his cinematic skills to the source novel’s properties. But a historical parallel, also involving another Japanese novelist, might be instructive:[1] Suehiro Tetchō was befriended by Jose Rizál while the two were traveling by ship to Europe in 1888, and subsequently published Nanyo no Daiharan (Severe Disturbance in the South Seas, Sumyodo, 1891), in which a Rizál-like figure rebels against Spanish occupation in Pinas and is assisted in his aspiration by the Emperor of Japan. Strange though wondrously interventionist, these artists from a northern archipelago; further studies ought to proceed forthwith.
Note
[1] An early source for information on the interaction between the two authors would be Josefa Saniel’s “Jose Rizál and Suehiro Tetchō: Filipino and Japanese Political Novelists,” Asian Studies, volume 2, no. 3 (1964), pp. 353–371. Renewed contemporary interest in these two derived from Benedict Anderson’s final volume Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso Books, 2006, later republished as The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination), where he referred to Caroline S. Hau and Shiraishi Takashi’s research, subsequently published as “Daydreaming about Rizal and Tetchō: On Asianism as Network and Fantasy,” Philippine Studies, volume 57, no. 3 (2009), pp. 329–388, DOI:10.13185/2244-1638.1684. I am grateful to Professor Epoy Deyto for providing me with access to The Guys from Paradise, and to Professor Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes for information, unavailable on English-language internet sources, on novelist Hayashi Yōji.
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