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Japan, helmed by writer-turned-director Raju Murugan, tries to be sarcastic and fatalistic about the government, the system, and otherworldly things. Still, behind all that facade, there is a mushy and optimistic heart that yearns for a change. The idea here is to create a character, a product of the corrupt system. Japan, like the country, has risen from the ashes. But the person Japan is different from the country. He isn’t hard-working, but a hedonistic thief. He has a reputation nationwide for robbing jewellery shops, banks, and whatnot. He leaves no evidence, thus remains evasive. He is a filmmaker. A cocky one at that as he uses his real-life accomplishments for film plots. His concept of true love is platonic. Hence, he doesn’t consummate his love with Sanju, who is now the last glamorous heroine of Tami cinema, played by Anu Emmanuel. On top of all the quirks, he has HIV. That’s all there is to Japan, the movie. It is all about Japan, the person.
Raju Murugan wanted to create a zany character and thrust him with some wacky, quirky, and amoralistic character traits. And he does that mostly with dialogue. A few attempts to show something about this enigmatic personality, like the bits from his films, don’t land well. The intended result is middling, just like the film.
In an attempt at character-building, Raju Murugan leaves the screenplay threadbare. A film can be a character study, but Japan is not that. Despite all of the information we are told about Japan, we don’t get to see his wackiness. We don’t see him pull off an incredible heist to believe all the myths. It could be because he has just received the most shocking message of his life that he has HIV. But isn’t it a great opportunity to show how he is different from us? On the contrary, Japan does what any sane person would do: he drinks and tries to meet his true love. On the other hand, all Southern states’ police departments are on his tail as they suspect Japan has robbed a jewellery shop that belongs to a highly influential entrepreneur, a key contributor to politicians. The stakes are high. The twist(?) is Japan didn’t do it. All of this doesn’t matter. The chase, the villains, the innocent collateral damage… nothing holds your attention. It is all generic. Japan has a unique character in a stale premise.
It might look easy but Karthi seems to have achieved something significant here. He plays a person who is a borderline clown. Things could have gone wrong in so many ways. Not a single moment we laugh at Karthi for his laughable intonation. He makes it work. What could have been the biggest problem, wasn’t a problem at all in Japan. Everything else was. Karthi should also be credited for playing a character who is HIV-positive. That’s a bold and long-overdue representation in an industry that thrives on machoism. But the whole thread is left unexplored. “Singathuku sikku vandha (When the lion falls sick)” is repeated twice in Japan, which seems to be the idea of the film. We are meeting this character at his lowest point in life. However, Raju Murugan has the onus to first show his high. Logan (2017) was a brilliant tragedy because we knew what Wolverine was capable of. Murugan fails here as the writer. He enters the film in the second act, which is great, but for his third act to work, we need to know the first. Instead, we get a prologue in the form of a tear-jerking flashback. “Japan…made in India” is how the hero here gets described. Well, I agree.
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