By Jake Wilson
THE CATS OF GOKOGU SHRINE ★★★★
(G) 120 minutes
The usual rule with documentaries is that the really good ones can be appreciated even by those with no previous interest in the subject matter. But I’ll be honest: with Kazuhiro Soda’s The Cats of Gokogu Shrine, it does help if you like cats.
Much of the documentary is spent watching the feline subjects do catlike things.Credit: Hi Gloss Entertainment
Then again, if you don’t like cats, do you even really like cinema? For us sensible people, anyway, the film offers many of the same pleasures as the most durable of all genres on YouTube.
Not millions of cats, as in the picture book classic, but at least a few dozen – tortoiseshell, marmalade and motley, with the scrawny look of strays (which they are).
Much time is spent watching them do catlike things: jostling and squabbling with one another, leaping for proffered fish, strolling up stone steps with a look of ownership, dozing under the slanted roof of a signboard or under a car where they’ve taken shelter from the rain.
The gathering place for the cats is a small Shinto shrine in the resort town of Ushimado in southern Japan, surrounded by cherry trees and high up on the edge of a bay. The steps lead down to a car park which doubles as a fishing spot, popular with older men who like the convenience of not having to walk far from where they’re parked.
Director Kazuhiro Soda at work on The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.Credit: Via Hi Gloss Entertainment
We become very familiar with the geography of this location over the course of the film, which like Soda’s earlier documentaries, appears to be basically a one-man job where he serves as his own camera operator, editor and producer.
In the observational tradition of America’s Frederick Wiseman, he does without music, voiceover or much in the way of narrative drive.
Unlike Wiseman, he’s relaxed enough to let his human subjects chat to the camera if they want. But rather than interviewing them in any probing manner, he mostly responds to their observations with versions of “Mm” or “Ah!”
Still, we do gradually gather that locals have varying feelings about the cats and how far they amount to a problem, a matter eventually hashed out in a lengthy scene at a council meeting, again very much in the Wiseman vein.
Tender-hearted viewers should be warned that the shrine’s cats tend to be short-lived – and while the film is a miracle of brevity compared with the average Wiseman opus, the running time of about two hours may still lead some to feel their patience is being tested.
Put another way, we’re invited to settle in and savour each moment rather than expecting to arrive at a destination, though Soda manages this with a light touch rather than being too insistently New Agey about it (a lengthy shot of a snail inching forward is the closest he gets to labouring the point).
Towards the end I started to daydream about how the film could be spun off into a weekly reality show, letting us get gradually more familiar with the individual cats as well as their visitors. The key would be to maintain the purity of the original: no narration, no effort to manufacture drama, every episode more or less the same as the last.
It could run for years and years. The trouble is it could also draw tourists to the shrine in massive numbers, which would kill the peaceful vibe and also wouldn’t do much for the cats.
Of course, that could happen anyway if The Cats of Gokogu Shrine is enough of a hit, an issue raised on camera by one of Soda’s fellow cat lovers. But the film in itself is a place we can now return to whenever we want.
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine is in cinemas now
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