GO — GO( Blu Ray)

Originally released in 2001 GO is the fifth feature film from Japanese director Isao Yukisada. It’s a coming-of-age tale about Korean-Japanese student Sugihara (Yōsuke Kubozuka) as he enrols in a Japanese high school to escape the oppressive systems of his life in North Korean education. During his time he becomes close friends with the son of a Yakuza boss, a fellow student from his North Korean school, and mostly importantly Sakurai Tsubaki (Ko Shibasaki). The pair hit it off but Sugihara decides to hide his true nationality from Sakurai, fearful of the xenophobia he could fall victim to.

GO opens with a reminder of one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines from Romeo and Juliet; “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” Yukisada essentially uses this line, and the whole play to a lesser extent, as a jumping-off point for the thematic study of the illogical nature of racial prejudice. Sure it’s a little on the nose, but it works as a strong backbone for the wider themes of GO. Sugihara himself occupies both the Montague and Capulet role, allowing Yukisada to craft a compelling internal conflict between accepting your heritage and forming a new identity. There’s a great scene early in the film where Sugihara’s father, played with a perfect sense of weariness by Tsutomu Yamazaki, is bartering with a desk clerk about his national identity and I think the resulting abandonment of his North Korean identity to simply make his family happy with a holiday sets up this idea of how nationality is a socially constructed roadblock really well. 

Sugihara and Sakurai’s central romance does prove incredibly compelling. Everything has this air of sweetness to it, capturing those feelings of teenage first love we come to expect from coming-of-age narratives. But even from the first moments of them meeting you can sense that there might not be something right, especially during a tense scene where Sugihara goes over for dinner with Sakurai’s parents where a discussion of what ‘Japan’ means comes up and sets up the inherited prejudice that is revealed to be present in Sakurai later. Sure there is a happy ending to all this, but it is hard not to get swept up in Sugihara’s impassioned rant about his status as an ‘alien’ disgusted here during the film’s climactic moments. 
Performances are fantastic across the board here. Kubozuka was the perfect choice to capture this teenage rage, his anger and internal confusion are brought across with real humanity. There is often a sense in Kubozuka’s performance of being overwhelmed by this idea of not meeting either set of national expectations, and the sympathy that is drawn to Sugihara from this performance is immeasurable. The rest of the cast are equally as good, but it is Kubozuka’s performance that really keeps you hooked into GO and he never lets up.  

For this new Blu-ray edition, courtesy of Third Windows Films, we are gifted with a slew of bonus material. We have a selection of trailers from the film's release, which pair nicely with the press launch of the film. So you get the chance to hear some interviews from both Yosuke Kubozuka and Isao Yukisada just as the film came out. Similarly, you have the stage greeting from the director and cast, which features some good responses from Yukisada about why he chose GO’s original novel for adaptation and some words from the novel’s author Kazuki Kaneshiro. Rounding off the set is a pair of extensive behind-the-scenes documentaries; Making of GO and Portrait of GO. Portrait, while shorter, goes a lot more into the thematic importance of the film with insights from the cast as to why these themes of prejudice are important to cover. 

GO is a real gem of a film and one that will hopefully find a new life for itself with this new release. Yukisada tackles weighty personal themes with humanity and gets the audience to strongly sympathise with Sugihara’s sense of alienation in both of his worlds. An underrated piece of post-2000s Japanese cinema and Yukisada deserves to have greater recognition for how he has crafted one of the best coming-of-age dramas. GO is available on Blu-ray from Third Window Films from the 22nd of May.