NYFF: I Just Didn't Do It

By Katey Rich

It's been 11 years since Masayuki Suo's last film, the romantic comedy Shall We Dansu? Since then he has worked on many projects, but none inspired him until I Just Didn't Do It, a dramatic expos of the Japanese criminal system.

"It has been six-and-a-half years since I started working on [this project], but this was the one I felt I absolutely had to do," he said at the press conference following the festival screening of his film.

Ryo Kase stars as Teppei Kaneko, an ordinary young man whose life is changed when he is accused of groping a teenage girl on a crowded commuter train. As it is on New York City subways, groping is a common occurrence, and often a case of one person's word against another's. Teppei is immediately taken into custody and languishes in jail for weeks, as his best friend and mother work to find lawyers to represent him. An astonishing 99.9% of defendants in Japanese trials are convicted, a sobering statistic that gives Teppei little hope of exoneration.

Teppei is apprehended on the subway platform.

"The fact that there is 99.9% percent conviction rate--that alone means the judges are presuming the accused are guilty," Suo said. "That's what's wrong with the Japanese trial system."

Suo's film is deeply earnest, striving to convey all the ways in which an innocent man's pleas of innocence can go unheard by prosecutors looking for a conviction. They constantly remind Teppei that it took the girl, only 15 years old, great courage to confront him on the subway platform; it's a strong reminder of how many girls and women suffer these indignities in silence, and extends the film's empathy to the victims as well as the wrongly accused.

"I wanted to stress that this really could happen to anybody, and that's how I wanted the audience to relate to this film," Suo explained. "Any ordinary Japanese man could be mistaken as a perpetrator, or any female, or anyone could become a victim of this crime."

Unfortunately the film's honest goals often get in its way, despite attempts to add style and character depth. The film plays as straight as an episode of Law & Order, except the only villain here is the legal system itself. Teppei is innocent, the judges are seen as well-intentioned, and even the prosecution is just doing its best. The result is a film that's often as dull as an encyclopedia entry, with no characters to guide the audience through a sea of legal terms and explanation of jail sentencing.

Curiously, Suo also gravely misunderstands the power of a flashback early in the film, when he shows two differing versions of the groping: Teppei's story, in which he is innocent, and the prosecutor's extrapolation, which shows Teppei pulling up the girl's skirt. The parallel flashbacks seem intended to cast suspicion on Teppei, but Suo remains firmly on Teppei's side for the rest of the film. The conflicting scenes hint at the more interesting film that could have been made, rather than the rah-rah social crusade shoehorned into a simple drama.