Review of Restless (2011) by Shiira — 31 Oct 2011

For their souls, the titular metalheads challenge death to a game of Battleship in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey"(a send-up of "The Seventh Seal", and wins, but the Grim Reaper turns out to be a poor sport, so it's not until the surfer dudes dominate at Clue, electric football, and Twister, does the scythe-carrying man begrudgingly lets them go.

After Death's battleship is sunk, it's clear that the boys won. Conversely, when Hiroshi, a kamikaze pilot from WWII, "blows up" Enoch's toy pieces to smithereens, every successive sinking presents a paradox, made so by the cultural objective of the player, since it means that the Japanese aviator has won, perversely, by crashing his plane into an American naval vessel, somewhere over a Pacific constructed out of blue plastic.

Hiroshi loses his life, many times over, every single day. While Enoch complains that his dead friend always wins, maybe he loses on purpose, in order to keep their symbiotic relationship intact. Win a game, Enoch intuits, and perhaps, Hiroshi will fade away.

The kamikaze needs some vestige of that faraway war, whereas Enoch enjoys the pilot's imperative to die. Both competitors need a new game, like Life. It's something that neither Hiroshi, nor Enoch, ever got to experience.

In the testimonies of the few remaining "tokkotai" members from the 2007 doc "Wings of Defeat", the aging kamikazes reveal that their comrades were not the automatons as seen in American films such as "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Pearl Harbor", but were in fact, scared boys, hemmed in by a culture which preached death before dishonor.

So scared, in fact, were some of these flyers, that they didn't complete their missions, choosing instead to return back home, rather than die in vain. It's a facet of the Japanese persona we never knew existed.

One doesn't normally associate free will with wartime soldiers, whose allegiance to the emperor was a testament to militaristic programming, but these interviewees are, in essence, conscientious objectors, or in other words, from the Japanese perspective: cowards.

Over the intervening years, since the bomb ended the war, suicides suc h as Hiroshi, and other pilots like him, after mulling things over, must have realized that their sacrifices were for nothing, but curiously, the aviator squares off against Enoch in a seemingly game of Battleship on a daily basis.

Most former soldiers don't like to relive their war experiences, and yet, here is Hiroshi, metaphorically nosediving into aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, and patrol boats. Since most kamikaze pilots received the highest honors in death, being promoted to positions of leadership posthumously, what's the deal with Hiroshi's purgatorial-like deferment from heaven.

Why is he stuck in the northwest with Enoch? Furthermore, the Japanese are notoriously closed-mouthed when it comes to talking about themselves, but, Hiroshi rattles off his sterling military record to Annabel before Enoch cuts him off.

There's a shrine in the sky? Why isn't he there? Maybe it's because Hiroshi turned his plane around, just like the surviving crew in the Morimoto film; maybe contrary to the love letter that he writes to his sweetheart, the ghost as a man, neither screamed "Banzai!" nor whispered the name of a girl, before plowing into enemy aircraft, because the suicide mission he had purported to carry out, in actuality, was a bogus journey.

Game after game, the disgraced pilot defeats Enoch in order to join his decorated comrades, but alas, it's fruitless. Battleship is only a game. It's a real probability that Enoch committed ritualistic suicide("hara-kiri"), because his prolonged life was an insult to those brave enough to make the ultimate sacrifice, therefore bringing shame to the family and a Japan razed to the ground by nuclear emissions.

"Restless", billed in some quarters as this generation's "Love Story", and sure, the Arthur Hiller film, for good reason, was the go-to film when it came to doomed love, but the seventies classic differs in one crucial way: Enoch, the funeral crasher(ala Bud Cort in "Harold and Maude"), really needs Annabel, an old soul(she dresses in clothes from Ruth Gordon's time) with terminal cancer, unlike Oliver Barrett, the preppie, who ultimately, despite denying it, marries the poor Catholic girl as a way of irking his fabulously rich and snobby parents.

If Oliver truly loved the pianist, he would have allowed the scholar to study abroad, in Paris, rather than turn her into a lawyer's wife. Oliver loves what she represents. On the other hand, Enoch just simply loves Annabel.

Unfortunately, he doesn't realize that Hiroshi is no Clarence, Angel Second Class from "It's a Wonderful Life". The kamikaze pilot hasn't earned his "wings". When Annabel dies, Hiroshi isn't there to escort her to heaven, but instead, acquires for himself a new Battleship partner, in his quest to become an admiral in the afterlife.