Takashi Miike, Japan\u2019s maestro of the extreme, now takes on a relatively sedate and mainstream genre: the courtroom drama. But he can\u2019t help bringing to it his signature shocks and unsubtle tropes. Sham is based on a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion. In the city of Fukuoka in south-west Japan, primary school teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil and driving him close to suicide on the grounds of the child supposedly having an American grandfather, his pure Japanese blood tainted by foreigners. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser? The film is based on Fabrication: The Truth About the \u201cMurder Teacher\u201d in Fukuoka, investigative journalist Masumi Fukuda\u2019s 2007 book about the case.<\/p>\n
Mirroring the prosecution and defence cases in court, Miike gives us both sides of the story in quasi-Rashomon style: first, that of the boy\u2019s mother Mrs Himuro (K\u00f4 Shibasaki) and in this version, the behaviour of the teacher (G\u00f4 Ayano) is truly sinister. Afterwards \u2013 the \u201cprosecution\u201d version having taken up very little of the film \u2013 we get the teacher\u2019s own account, and it soon dawns on us that this is in fact the objective reality. He is a gentle, reasonable man, loved by his pupils; he wouldn\u2019t hurt a fly and his remarks on the boy\u2019s family background are entirely innocent. The trouble stemmed from having been persuaded by the school\u2019s terrified headteacher to apologise to the parents in a doomed attempt to make the case go away and to confess to corporal punishment on the grounds of one misjudged chastisement after a bullying incident, intended to show him how awful violence is.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In the end, this film does not sit on the fence; there is no Rashomon-style mystery about where the truth lies. Yet Miike\u2019s own creative energies are galvanised, I think, by showing the teacher in his \u201cevil\u201d guise and also, perhaps, by showing Mrs Himuro as a virtual J-horror villain with long straight black hair and a pale impassive face \u2013 not far, in some ways, from the avenger Asami in his classic chiller Audition<\/a>. And the bullying scenes, the teacher beset by slanderous rumour, the school\u2019s insincere apologies, and the air of ambiguity and mystery \u2026 it may be a clue that the original 2003 case also indirectly inspired Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s mystery drama Monster from 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n