^^^Seconding the above, as I repost my deleted review w/light revisions
Fujiko Mine’s Lie (2019)
I wasn’t sure if I was going to do this one because I’d actually seen reviews covering the feminist/social aspects, which I’m not nearly able to do as well. A couple of them felt, to me, pretty stretched, as if the reviewer felt the need to provide cover for their own enjoyment, to the point where I saw stuff like how it refutes the male gaze and, come on, see above. But I was always planning to do a little note:
Fujiko Mine’s Lie kicks ass, or rather the underside of your chin. Or it grabs balls. Or hits you with a Lamborghini Jarama, and all of there are not just in the action sense (probably wouldn’t want to say it whips, though). In any event it is very, very good and actually does something truly new in an old franchise.
Highly RecommendedBy virtue of the “Koike series’s” rotating character focus and total untethering from the main Lupin line,
Fujiko Mine’s Lie was always going to be a fuller role reversal than we usually get. We follow Fujiko through her scheme, while Lupin and Jigen are on the sidelines either trying to get in on her loot or casing out the b-plot; Fujiko even sends a lighthearted taunting note to the villains. She does still gets rescued, but it happens at a natural intersection of the two groups’ plots, not from some heroic or quasi-heroic response to her distress.
The trio’s interaction’s pretty refreshing—they all know one another and have a free, unstilted banter, with a friendly easiness between Lupin and Jigen. It’s a lot of fun to spend time with the trio. This is the more “adult-oriented” Lupin series, but that doesn’t mean it’s
darker (there’s Actual Violence, but Jigen also shoots a gun out of a mook’s hand only for the gun to go flying into another mook’s head). The art’s getting more Monkey Punch-ish as these go on, too—Jigen’s basically his manga shape and Lupin’s face is more plastic than its been in a while.
Fujiko’s the one saddled with a young moppet this time, Gene. His father, a mining company accountant, extorted millions from his employer (I think there was either a subtitle issue or a ¥ → USD one since they say he stole 500 million—I feel something like 5 is what they were going for), in part to pay for Gene’s cardiac surgery. Fujiko is after it (with Lupin and Jigen on her tail) and served as Gene and his father’s “maid,” which Gene saw right through (what maid leaves parks a Jarama in the driveway?). There have been a lot of muppets who form a protective, implicitly trusting sort of bond with one of the mains post-
Cagliostro (as with Jigen and Fujiko in
Goodbye, partner, below), but Fujiko andGene have a tense relationship. Fujiko can’t easily handle his truly child-like emotions (he’s annoying, but in a real way), much less charm him, so her “mommy” persona’s not all that convincing either. It’s only when she takes actual maternal actions—tending his scrapes, cleaning him off, actually showing him some maternal intimacy (Gene’s dad’s a widower so it’s a new feeling for him too). It’s an unexpected place for Fujiko, and it brings out some unexpected depth.
There’s definitely something under the surface as well. No one needs or really wants anything of these characters’ pasts (
The Woman Called Fujiko might be considered an extended fake-out in that direction, and in
Part V it’s only the characters’ recent histories that set the backdrop), but there’s a lot of formative-sounding stuff there. Fujiko tells Gene about the need to leave the past behind and that the problem with kids is that they aren’t independent enough and always go crying for help.
That latter one’s meant to be Fujiko’s apparent heel-turn—she found a way to charm Gene, he gives her the bank info and she leaves him behind, but she heads to the hotel bar before the bank.
It’s through affection—sexual, not maternal—that she defeats Bincam, the quasi-human assassin-clone. At first he seems too cartoonish, with his dusty aura, pale skin, hypnotic eyes, and taste for walnuts, but—and again this is a credit to the scene-setting—he becomes, if not more real, but less cartoonish and more uncanny (that nictitating blink). And he’s just human enough to respond, like some movie monster, to the slightest (or, since this is Fujiko, not so subtle) hint of sexual interest, which she ultimately uses against him.
This is all, of course, social engineering, made effective by Fujiko’s charisma.
As producer Yu Kiyonozo put it, “objectively [they] are a bunch of evil-doers.” There’s some ambiguity left in there, though. it’s hard for any of the filmed media to really commit to this—it will play on our emotions, no matter what. The final scene is scripted to let us draw our own conclusions, but it’s rendered and voiced in such a lovely way that the audience will let itself be pulled a certain way, even knowing it might be a misdirection.
• Major credits to Miyuki Sawashiro’s voice acting—for one thing, this is the most range, and most new ground for Fujiko, we’ve seen in a long time (even in
The Woman Called Fujiko she was a bit of a cipher) and it’s great.
• The (Yamamoto-) Koike films have a thing for plants.
The Woman Called Fujiko relied on psychotropic petals, the symbolic meanings and local locations of certain plants were a plot point in
Jigen’s Gravestone, and we have Fujiko’s knowledge of plant-based poisons here. And her knowledge is actually accurate: scopolamine is real, is used in truth serums, and can be found in angel’s trumpets, though the animation gets the plant itself completely wrong.
• Watch-spotting: Fujiko wears a (hand-wound, of course) Cartier Tank Cintrée (or similar). It’s also a unisex watch, which is appropriate for her taking a lead role in a very dude-ish franchise (I actually wore [until its stem broke in 2021] a Timex “homage” from roughly the same time period, so bonus points from—or for—me).
• Lupin makes a concession to climate and
doesn’t wear a jacket(!) in this one (he still does wear a tie for a good chunk of it). I also like Jigen’s wide-necked purple t—climate-appropriate and the sort of southern European fashion concession he joked about in
Jigen’s Gravestone.
• Car spotting: there’s Fujiko’s aforementioned Jarama, which is really the automotive equivalent of a deep cut. Its sort of half-lidded-to-slow blink-awake headlamp motion makes for a cool little moment (how is there no gif or decent video of it!) and fits her character. Lupin and Jigen are in a Dodge Challenger and the police drive Coronets; I think the panel van Lupin and Jigen use at one point is a Chevy.
• There’s a lot of comfort in using actual brands—the Challenger has an actual period performance package, Fujiko smokes Kools, &c., but what’s very clearly Union Pacific is puzzlingly renamed Union Canopus.
• A little Douglas Hofstadter appetizer: one of the key moments of this film is when Bincam, slowly reclaiming his humanity, looks into Fujiko’s eyes and sees himself, and we get a couple seconds’ recursion from that, kind of like the self-referential loops Hofstadter associates with the formation of our sense of self.
• Even though I roll my eyes at it,
Fujiko Mine’s Lie really does lend itself to being analyzed and discoursed to death.
My favorite instance is Bincam, finally yielding to his attraction to Fujiko, gets impaled on a long, thin blade. Oh god it’s in the midst of a dry/wet = male/female imagery too.
You really could call Dr. Freud in for so many scenes here. I think his main response, though, would be that Fujiko Mine’s Lie kicks ass.
[Again, no screencaps, so images via Lupin Central and the aforementioned interview.]Goodbye, partner (2019)
Lupin TV movies continued to tie fans over until a new (all-ages) series came, filling the literal decades between
Parts III and
IV before pausing again; now in the wake of
Part V they’ve restarted.
Part V opened up the possibility of a more “traditional” Lupin that nonetheless advances. Can the tv films—emblematic of stasis—build on that growth? Goodbye, partner is basically comfort food (Lupin’s even back in his red jacket for the first half), but elevated comfort food—it doesn’t really push forward, but it does push a bit upward.
The Lupin-Jigen breakup—the “goodbye partner” of the title—obviously never takes. Usually it’s either some villainously orchestrated misunderstanding or a ploy by Lupin the audience isn’t let in on. Here it’s quickly obvious that it’s Jigen who’s up to something. This puts Lupin in the place of the audience, trying to figure out the main ploy. In another reversal Jigen’s the one protecting the young innocent, even trying out Lupin’s flag trick (this time with flowers) from
Cagliostro. It’s unfortunate, then, that Jigen’s weighed down by the writing and character design. His eyes are almost always covered by a case of terrible hat hair, and the taciturn gravity’s turned up past 11 to 22. Kiyoshi Kobayashi’s nearly ninety and sounds like death here, but he doesn’t sound that way in other recent Lupin media (see above, where he’s in good spirits)—it’s all the script. It robs a generally well-rounded guy—we see his eyes all the time and he has more than one mode—of any means of expression.
That anvil doesn’t weigh down the familiarly batshit plot, though. It involves crystals, Zenigata handcuffing a bunch of ICPO officers, “quantum,” the actual singularity, an evil Elon Tesla-type named Roy (there’s even an explicit knock on Tesla here), and a strange fixation on Chopiniana—the global A.I.’s anthropomorphic interface is even based on Chopin’s little sister Emilka. But it’s all crafted quite well with good humor and good pacing, so it’s very fun to go from one leap to the next. I kind of rolled my eyes at the beginning since we start out with the kid-friendly disabling guns, but there’s actually a nice progression from that to injuring to maiming to finally killing as we approach the end. This story actually builds somewhere!
Omnipotent artificial intelligence is an old theme,
going all the way back to the first series. Then Lupin confounded the computer simply by being unpredictable. Something similar happens here, but with more sophistication, a lot than you’d expect given the bad computer jargon. It’s explicitly stated here that the A.I. operates by correlations, i.e. machine learning. It lacks a general intelligence, our ability to find meaning or truly original solutions (see
trurl’s old post on sandboxes versus general intelligence here, or, of all things,
The Atlantic’s recent article on Douglas Hofstadter, and Hofstadter’s written about Chopin’s piano music so hmm…). After Goemon slices something Emilka notes that there’s actually nothing metallurgically special about the sword, it’s all in the wielding—a touch I really liked.
The A.I. is unlocked by playing a passage of Chopin just as Chopin played it, which is why the film’s young innocent is a musical prodigy performing in a Chopin competition. There are some thorny questions on the ability of preadolescent performers to perform the requisite emotional depth—or rather, they clear can
perform it but can they do it? It’s a nice mirror of the A.I., even if unintentional. And it’s only when she breaks out of this and improvises with another person (a Hofdstadterian strange loop!)—Fujiko, of all people, is the other pianist—that the A.I. can finally be confounded.
Fujiko—self-taught pianist!—a real an aesthete here (it’s been a good year—last year—for Fujiko’s characterization, hasn’t it?). She’s only after stuff here, as usual. But it’s something more than “women are vain”—she’s specifically after the expensive watch Roy’s wearing. It’s a step above the regular diamonds and such, and it ties back into the special’s love of all things analog. You can admire the craft, and if anything goes wrong it can always be repaired.
RecommendedIt’s by some margin the best of the specials I’d seen to that point, even weighed down by Jigen’s poor characterization, though I probably brought more into my viewing than the special was giving out, so to speak.
Stray observations• Having known about the black jacket even before considering this special, I assumed it was a nod to Lupin’s look in
Blood Spray or even that the specials were going to inch in the parallel’s series’s direction. It almost certainly isn’t and they are not. I think it’s more to highlight that Jigen takes on the Lupin role for a chunk of this special.
• Fujiko’s first outfit represents a a real breakthrough in Madonna-whore research (
lower-right,
image credit).
• The A.I. takes over the world’s Teslas, taking control from their drivers and repositioning them to make way for more important cargo. The only thing on the road not affected is an Austin-Healey Bug-Eyed Sprite, about as analog a car as there is—if anything goes wrong it can be repaired. And repaired again. But just make sure it doesn’t suddenly need to be repaired in the left lane of the Edens, as happened to my uncle’s Healey.
• Roy.
• His full name, Roy Waters, is less ridiculous but sounds more like “great session musicians who’s worked with everyone” than “supervillain.”
• It’s a story of oligarchs, lavish luxury goods, international espionage, and corrupt military contractors. We get into the Oval Office and wonder if we’re going to see the president’s face. When we get the reveal, it’s the face of… Hilary Clinton!? (“Great read, Velma.”) I doubt these specials have a long pre-production period (lol no) but it does make sense—Roy’s obviously an evil Musk, but he reveals himself to be a jingoist too (to the point of eliciting a groan). The role of the States here—generally on “our” side but all this is also their fault and they’re going to make damn sure no one knows it—is a much better fit for her.
• It’s similar to the role of the States in
The Mystery of Mamo and in some ways
Goodbye, partner feels like a toned-down version of that film (there’s a superintelligence on an island with high-cultural trappings, after all).
[Screencap via Netflix’s website since I didn’t have a chance to take my own; unfortunately I could not find the original other-person’s-screencap of Jigen and the flower trick from last time]
