Director Daihachi Yoshida talks about Tokyo Film Fest competition entry Teki Cometh

In its deliberate and thoughtful pace, Daihachi Yoshida's new film Teki arrives is characteristic of the Japanese director's career. The feature, which will have its world premiere at the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival and will compete in the festival's main competition, is yet another literary adaptation from a filmmaker who is an avid reader.

«Right at the beginning of the pandemic the bookstores were closed and so I reread the books I had. One of them was Teki [title of the original book and the film in Japanese, meaning enemy]. People all over the world couldn't go out and meet others, it was something like everyone living an elderly lifestyle, like the main character in the story,” recalls Yoshida, speaking to The Hollywood journalist the day the Tokyo Fest lineup was announced.

Literary adaptations have proven incredibly fruitful for Yoshida. After two decades of making commercials, music videos, short films and television dramas, he made his debut with feature films Funuke Show some love, you losers! in 2007, based on the novel by Yukiko Motoya. The film earned him national acclaim and an invitation to Critics' Week in Cannes. But he's probably best known internationally for the quirky 2012 high school drama The Kirishima issuebased on a novel by Ryo Asai. That film won Yoshida's Japanese Academy Awards for best picture and director, as well as an unusually long theatrical run. Two years later, Pale moonbased on a novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta, it was in main competition in Tokyo.

In Teki arrivesan adaptation of a book by the famous Japanese novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, the protagonist, played by Kyozo Nagastuka, is a retired French literature professor who gives guest lectures and plans his end based on when his money runs out. Old friends and former students come to visit us. During one of his rare excursions, he meets an attractive young French literature student played by Yumi Kawai, recently seen in the Netflix series Extremely inappropriate. The monochrome cinematography evokes times gone by and the lines between reality and imagination are blurred.

“I had a completely different reaction to the book than when I first read it in my thirties, rereading it when I was approaching 60,” Yoshida says. “I was aware that I was getting older and had experienced the deaths of several people close to me, and that I would not live another 40 or 50 years. It lit a spark in me and I started thinking about how I would do it if I had to film it.”

After writing the script, Yoshida showed it to the book's prolific and sometimes outspoken author, Tsutsui, who celebrated his 90th birthday a few days before the festival's press conference. Tsutsui gave his blessing, noting only that the story is not about dementia and that the protagonist actively throws himself into his fantasies.

Veteran actor Nagatsuka studied and worked in France in his youth. While there, he appeared as a Chinese general in a French comedy (Les Chinois in Paris) largely because he was one of the few East Asians in Paris in the early 1970s, but it sparked his interest in acting. However, the French connection with Teki arrives it's simply a coincidence, according to Yoshida.

“The reason I shot in black and white is because no one stopped me,” he says with a smile. «This still doesn't explain why. I thought the monochrome had a low-key vibe that suited the main character's quiet and somewhat stoic life. But when I made the film, I felt it had a “rich” quality that maximizes the imagination of the viewer, myself included. So now I want to ask people who make color films why they choose to do so.”

Multiple scenes of food preparation and coffee set the pace of the protagonist's existence, but Yoshida was resigned to the fact that the food wouldn't look as appetizing without color.

“But the kitchen staff were so talented that I thought it was delicious even though it was in black and white, and while I was editing the film it made me really, really hungry.”

As with the division between fantasy and the real world, the nature of the mysterious “enemy” of the title remains somewhat ambiguous.

“He is an enemy of the north, which historically for the Japanese would mean Russia. However, the main character's enemies can easily be interpreted as death or old age. But while making the film, I slowly realized that everyone, regardless of age, has enemies, and these can be defined as a goal, a difficulty to face or a reason for living. I think it is one of the elements necessary for all human beings.”