In competition at the Venice Film Festival with “Mr. Nelson, did you kill people?”, the Japanese cult director talks about the wounds of Vietnam and all conflicts. A powerful and raw film, which however lets go at the end
Mr. Nelson, did you kill people? «Mr. Nelson, did he kill people?” It is the question that bounces in the silence of a class of young schoolchildren, from an eight-year-old girl to the petrified face of Allen Nelson, a veteran of the war in Vietnam, from which in truth, deep down, he never returned. Shinya TsukamotoJapanese cult director, is warmly welcomed in Venice. Film in the running for the Golden Lion, Mr. Nelson, did you kill people? it talks about a conflict from half a century ago, but meanwhile it resonates with all the wars of yesterday and today.
From melee to drones
Shinya Tsukamoto, icon of underground cinema, burst into the attention of cinephiles in 1989 with Tetsuohis masterpiece and extreme and memorable cyberpunk manifesto.
Habitual at the Venice Film Festival, he now returns to the Lido with a new chapter of his exploration of wars and their horrors. Mr. Nelson, did you kill people? (original title Nelson san, anata wa hito wo koroshimashitaka?) follows Nobi (2014) e Hokage – Fire Shadow (2023), which also analyzed the wounds of conflicts. Now he immerses himself once again in that swamp of pitch and blood, taking us to a Vietnam so far away and so close and to the America of its veterans.
«Today wars are fought with drones, no longer hand-to-hand as then, but in this way everything becomes even more cowardly: we distance ourselves from the possible victim, studying it from a distance», reflects Tsukamoto in Venice. “However, nothing changes for those who are victims of war, torn apart, yesterday and today.”
The psychotherapy of war
Mr. Nelson, did you kill people? tells the true story of African-American veteran Allen Nelson, played as a young man by Mark Merphy and as an adult from Rodney Hicks. At the front, in the oppressive heat of the Vietnamese forest, he lost every sense of humanity, as he recalled years later with anguish, speaking with his psychotherapist, a solemn Geoffrey Rush. “Once we crossed the threshold, there were no limits to our atrocities.”
And again: “At first I kept track of how many people I had killed, then I stopped because there were too many.” Back in his homeland, inner demons grip him. Rush is the voice of his conscience and his unconscious that repeatedly asks him: “Why did you kill those people?”.
«”Mr. Nelson, did you kill people?”, “Why did you kill those people?”: ever since the Greeks wrote wonderful plays, these are universal questions that man has always set himself and now even more so given the number of conflicts that exist in the world”, observes Rush on the Lido.
The film develops between the present and flashbacks along Allen Nelson’s repeated psychotherapy sessions. A slow and inexorable passage through the chaos again so that the ghosts loosen their grip.
Vietnam seen by an African American
Filmed in English and in four countries, including United States, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan, Mr. Nelson, did you kill people? it is a powerful film which, however, loses strength in the last part, when potential endings are chased and the intensity loosens its grip.
Tsukamoto captures how much monstrosity dwells in the human being, between severed ears as a trophy and the corpses of women and elderly people arranged in rows like bait. But in Allen Nelson’s darkened heart the gospel song resonates This little light of mine (“This little light of mine, I’ll let it shine”) and that little flame still shines.
«When I read the script for the first time, it stayed with me for about a week and I told myself that I absolutely had to play this role because it tells a story we have never seen from this perspectivethat of an African American in Vietnam,” Hicks said on the Lido.
«There are no films about African-American veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, it is a topic that is little covered. We generally see heroic films with a winner or a loser. What I like about Mr. Nelson, did you kill people?instead, is that it is not centered on the soldiers but on humanity, on what is right and what is wrong and how do we wake up every day, knowing that we will always have the possibility to move forward.”
