Monday / Mandei (2000)

A man wakes up in a strange hotel room and can’t remember how he got there. This is a traditional film noir set-up, but instead of the dead woman in the bed beside him, Takagi finds that he has a newspaper dated Monday, an almost empty bottle of booze, the Book of Mormon, a shotgun, and half of Tokyo’s police force gathering outside the hotel. How it came to that is gradually revealed to him.

It all evolved from a single unrelated event. His first memory is attending a funeral. Partway through, the family receives a call from the dead man’s doctor saying his pacemaker must be disconnected lest he explode during cremation. Takagi is delegated to do this but cuts the wrong wire, causing the pacemaker to explode there. Traumatized and feeling guilty, he goes to a bar and calls his girlfriend, but she is angry that he skipped her birthday party and won’t let him finish his sentences to explain. When she walks out, Takagi keeps drinking until a guy beside him at the bar predicts he will meet a super woman, which he does when he knocks over the Chinese Checkers on the bar and a ball rolls down to a mysterious, slinky woman in white. When he comes out of the toilet, she is gone, replaced by her yakuza boyfriend, but she returns and the two get Takagi so drunk the gang drags him to the yakuza’s own club. There, things get silly, then sexy, then dangerous, as he accidentally comes into possession of the yakuza’s shotgun and kills him and another gangster.

Out on the street at dawn, he observes a pimp/prostitute mugging team and decides to help the man who was mugged, but ends up shooting the muggers. All of this is caught on a traffic camera, so by Monday morning he has been identified and traced. How he got to the hotel is still a blur, but now he is all over TV as well as the papers and the SWAT team is coming down the hall.

Written and directed by Sabu, the pseudonym used by character actor Hiroyuki Tanaka, Monday is a deadpan black comedy, each episode built on slowly developing visual gags, with the violence mostly bloodless. Then, Takagi relives the street scene when he sees the camera footage on TV and the gags disappear as he realizes his life is over.

Takagi is a typical young salaryman, his glasses making him seem bland, but Shinichi Tsutsumi is handsome enough to make it believable that he might have a chance with the slinky woman in white. He is a surprisingly rubbery actor, and as the booze increases, his physical inhibitions relax, starting with a typical drunk’s stagger, then a dance at the toilet as he contemplates the woman in white, then a solo disco dance that is both loose-limbed and awkward, followed by a sexy dance with the woman that is a marvel of the power of editing, and then by his off-balance meeting with the muggers.

One of the persistent social problems of urban Japan has been drunkenness among otherwise respectable salarymen, who are expected as part of their job to go to bars with their bosses or their clients after long days at the office, the excessive drinking further encouraged by the bar hostesses who get a cut of the bill.  As Takagi is writing his farewell note before he tries to commit suicide, he starts to blame his mess on the alcohol (and he definitely consumed a lot). Then he crushes up the note and decides that booze wasn’t really the problem.

In the American argument on “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” Takagi and Sabu, like the overwhelming majority of Japanese, comes down on the side of “Guns kill people.” No matter how drunk Takagi became, he would have never killed anyone had he not accidentally had the gun handed to him. But none of the murder sprees that caught national attention and were eventually examined in movies (such as Vengeance is Mine or Live Today, Die Tomorrow) involved drunkenness. Alcohol contributed to Takagi’s killings, but not because it released an inner impulse to kill, as seen without alcohol in Cure, but simply because a gun was in his hand at the time. This leads to an implausibly upbeat ending, which turns out not to be the real ending at all, for there is one final twist.

A lot of Monday is very funny, no matter how you might personally feel about alcohol or guns. I particularly liked the deadpan way the whole funeral stopped to rearrange the coffin because they just realized the body was not facing north, or the yakuza complaining that it took him years of practice to learn that yakuza scowl we see in so many movies and that he can only do it for a little while without getting a headache, or the fact that the muggers, after literally bouncing Takagi over their car, still stop at the red light in the middle of the night where he catches up with them.

The music, mostly dance remixes by Captain Funk of songs like “Home Sweet Home” and “Twist and Shout,” is pushy, rough, and unexpectedly suitable for the off-kilter situations. Sabu uses a lot of slick editing, apparently mostly by him since the credited editor made only one movie, and the production design is absolutely terrific, with each segment in a different but tightly controlled color palette with Takagi’s black suit tying together the black clothes of the funeral and the black worn by the police approaching his door.