Charlie Kaufman once wrote that death comes faster than you think, and this is true but it also leaves slower than you’d want, for with a passing comes the flood of memories leaving a you-sized crater in the hearts of those you knew and loved. Many films have dealt with death and grief, but few have truly considered the initial emptiness and mystery of loss as poignantly as Takumi Saitoh’s Blank 13. Based on the life of the film’s screenwriter Koji Hashimoto, it examines the gaping hole left in mild-mannered armored truck driver Koji Matsuda (Issei Takahashi) after learning his father Masato (Lily Franky), an inveterate gambler, has died of stomach cancer. Thirteen years before, Masato left his family one night to get cigarettes and never came back, leaving his mother Hiroko (Misuzu Kanno) and older brother Yoshiyuki (Saitoh) scrambling to keep food on the table and to pay back his yakuza gambling debts.
The film opens in medias res at Masato’s funeral with a brilliant bit of shtick where an increasingly flustered temple worker has to shoo away misplaced wealthy, well-dressed mourners for a different service, leaving a tiny yet motley assortment of wastrels left over for the father’s pitiful service. Balking at the paltry proceedings, Koji dives into a soup of tragic memories that dominate the first half of the film. The earliest of his father takes place, naturally, in a mahjong parlor: Masato coolly and casually dismisses the news that Koji’s school paper on a trip the two took to a baseball stadium won an award, plopping it down on the table where his gambling buddies use it as scrap paper to scribble bets. Cut to the family huddled together in silence chewing cheap curry as gangsters bang on their door over Masato’s debts. Then, to Hiroko getting hit by a car delivering newspapers and to her gingerly applying lipstick to her swollen, bruised face as she leaves the same evening for less reputable work. We look on as Yoshiyuki struggles to learn to cook bento for Koji’s school lunches and as Koji, huddled in a literal hole in a wall, does his homework by the light of a single bulb.
We watch Koji as he see’s his family grows through absense and pain.
The memories keep churning until we cut one last time to Koji visiting a withered Masato in the hospital, still calling in expensive bets on a cell phone in the middle of conversations. The reunion smacks of impotent anti-climax as Koji leaves in disgust, tossing a pack of cigarettes at the dying man, never to see him again.
Only after he’s exhausted Koji’s past does the film’s title card appear, neatly disecting Blank 13 into two parts, the first revealing the source of Koji’s resentment, the second exploring Saitoh’s central theme of how death proves humans incapacity to truly understand mankind. Needled by an avuncular Buddhist monk more Midwest youth pastor than stoic bodhisattva, the bizarre melange of mourners—all unknown to Koji and his family—step forward and pay tribute to the man who changed their lives: a loudmouth fellow gambler marvels at Masato’s willingness to lend money and forgive those who ran off on him (“He knew their guilt would haunt them forever.”); a bar hostess recalls how he sang karaoke songs about forgiveness and dispensed sagacious advice to her fellow bartenders; a crossdressing nightclub owner tearfully remembers how he saved his life by taking him in off the street; a wastrel sings the deceased a song before pulling out a pair of pliers to extract Masato’s platinum teeth before they’re incinerated in the crematorium. One by one the number of strange mourners continues to grow, and through their stories Koji learns how precious little he knew or understood his father.
Blank 13 is only a scanty 70 minutes and yet the film is one of the richest, most nuanced cinematic texts of the year. That this is Saitoh’s first directorial effort is nothing short of extraordinary, for it balances a steely-eyed, understated mise-en-scène with a propensity for tonal whiplash that most veteran directors can’t match—scenes, shots, and even individual lines can turn on a dime, fluctuating from tragic to inspiring to knee-slappingly hilarious without missing a beat. Consider the mourners. Most directors would either portray them as over-the-top grotesques or melodramatic sob stories. Saitoh understands that all human beings are mixtures of both, so they are presented accordingly. Neither is Masato ultimately absolved of his abandonment by over a decade of good deeds and selflessness. Forgiveness was never the point; here is a film about compassionate empathy. Despite its overt Buddhist overtones, there’s an almost Catholic undercurrent of redemptive grace through good works: Masato may have never been a good man, but he achieved a kind of sanctification by saving so many others. Does it forgive abandoning Koji, Yoshiyuki, and Hiroko? No but it’s more than they imagined. We are all worth more than the sum of our failings. With Blank 13, Saitoh gently yet firmly reminds us there’s another side of that tally, even if nobody else can see it.
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