Long before the title card hits, Miike Takashi’s crime drama Sham is off like a shot. A team of lawyers approaches a courthouse in a mass of whipping coats, while primary school teacher Yabushita Seiichi (Ayano Gô) is met with a riot of flashbulbs from the ravening press as he arrives on the scene. Mere moments later, we’re already inside the courtroom, witnessing the testimony of Himuro Ritsuko (Shibasaki Kô), who recounts the abuses allegedly committed against her son (Miura Kira) by Mr. Yabushita in sordid detail.
The film’s opening is quintessential Miike, given the emotional and physical violence that Yabushita enacts with such cool, smiling sadism. The flashbacks certainly show us a monster, one who mocks Himuro’s son’s “tainted blood” (it’s purported that the child’s grandfather was American), lifts him by his ears until they tear at the lobes, and encourages him to take his own life by jumping from the school’s roof. But our trust in what we’ve seen is swiftly upended by Yabushita’s assertion that what we’ve accepted as fact may just be an elaborate, twisted fantasy designed to make us condemn Yabushita before we’ve heard his version of the events.
In 2003, Mr. Yabushita is a dedicated fourth-grade teacher who finds himself in hot water after conducting a round of home visits with parents. Mrs. Himuro claims that Yabushita has been verbally and physically tormenting her son in front of his class in a purposeful attempt to drive him to suicide. Yabushita denies the claims, but the school’s administrators pressure him to apologize, leading to further scandal and a media frenzy when he admits in front of a gathering of parents to using corporal punishment. With his life falling apart, Yabushita takes legal action to restore his good name and hold the administration who failed him accountable.
For all the excitement and propulsion of the film’s setup, Miike approaches Mori Hayashi’s screenplay with the sedate confidence of an elder statesman. The film is based upon Fabrication: The Truth About the Fukuoka Murder Teacher Case by Japanese journalist Fukuda Masumi, and the disreputable charge of the film’s opening minutes puts the viewer on the back foot when things switch gears. Miike leaves us not just uncertain of the truth, but perhaps hungry for more toothsome indecency, making us willing consumers of the exact sorts of salacious media narratives that Yabushita is subjected to. It’s an elegantly merciless game of withholding on Miike’s part, leaving us waiting for the other shoe to drop while we’re distracted from the fact that the first one never fell in the first place.
There’s a reactionary sting to Sham’s distrust of the media, educational establishment, and especially its view on falsely reported crimes targeting men. That an element of Yabushita’s verbal abuse toward Takuto is rooted in national animus doesn’t help matters, as the claims of prejudice are revealed to be just as frivolous and weaponized as all the rest. However, Sham is, above all, a human drama that skirts topicality to ruminate on the nature of truth itself.
Ayano gives one of the stronger and more memorable lead performances in Miike’s recent output, channeling a put-upon, Jimmy Stewart-esque righteous pain and befuddlement, and though one wishes we got further glimpses of the “homicide teacher” as presented in the film’s opening act, it’s a good thing to want to see even more from him. Shibasaki, though, is truly the core around which Sham is built. Disconnected and sphinxlike, Himuro’s impassivity is maddening in a film about the quest for truth where she’s a perpetual roadblock, and though we get bread crumbs cluing us into her past and what may drive her, Sham sagely keeps her a mystery to us—her frosty remoteness haunting even the film’s peaceful closing passages.
Sham is primarily concerned with individual experience at odds with dominant narratives, and whether knowing one’s own reality can ever be solace enough if everyone else considers it fiction. The title itself is a spoiler, and though things work out well for those who deserve peace in the end, Miike knows that happy endings aren’t always resolutions: Wrongs are righted and a version of reality is accepted, but there will always be a Mrs. Himuro, whose own truth is defiantly and eternally unknowable to everyone but herself.
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