ABRAXAS (Japan, 2010)
Directed by: Naoki Kato
Starring: Suneohair Kyoshinen, Rie Tomosaka, Kaoru Kobayashi, Manami Honjou

Greeted with wild enthusiasm at the Sundance Film Festival, ABRAXAS is already earning comparisons to the movies of Ingmar Bergman, but we like to believe it’s bigger than that. This is enlightenment by electric guitar. Jonen (played by Suneohair, a real-life rock star in Japan) used to be a punk rocker, but now he’s a Zen Buddhist monk. Crippled by manic depression and the survivor of several suicide attempts, he’s adrift in his robe. He wants to be a good man but there’s a demon burning in his heart that he needs to set free. His road to nirvana, he realizes, isn’t leading him away from his punk rock past, but back to it.

Finally, with the wary blessing of his wife (who begs him not to take off all his clothes onstage) he decides that he’s going to get in touch with his own demons by embracing them and giving one last rock show. His small town karaoke bar won’t let him perform there and so he builds his own stage and gives the performance of his life. It doesn’t sound like much, but that final concert is a trip out of the darkness and into the light, and, like the concert that closes this year’s selection Ringing in Their Ears, it is a masterpiece of filmmaking.

Director, Naoki Kato, learned film at the feet of Takeshi Kitano and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and in this, second feature, he uses everything he learned from them to make a movie that talks about how Buddhist monks fit into modern day Japan, how they fit into their families and how they fit into the universe. It’s also a movie that’s DIY guide to defeating bipolar manic depression with nothing more than meditation and rock and mayhem. And, finally, it’s the universal “Om” transformed into a howl of electric guitar feedback.