Cloud By Kiyoshi Kurosawa Is a Sobering Exploration of the State of Trust in Modern Times.

(Life)Wanted. (Soul)Sold

Cloud is a Japanese drama about a factory worker named Yoshii who decides to escape the drudgery of his nine-to-five to pursue the more lucrative avenues of online selling. To be more precise, our protagonist buys popular items in bulk and sells them at a profit online, taking advantage of the principle of scarcity to drive up product value. He goes as far as to move out of the city with his girlfriend and also employs a young local to help with some of the grunt work of his new operation.

However, the selling of fake goods and the monopolising of certain markets comes to have a negative impact on a great many of the faceless denizens who occupy the worldwide web, with some of the more determined, or perhaps desperate and deranged, taking it upon themselves to track down the one responsible for their misery to extract a little satisfying payback. The main collective who track Yoshii consists of his former employer, an old school acquaintance, one of his sellers, a fellow reseller, and a more random individual who had seemed to pick up the taste of human blood and the thrill of the odd witch hunt. Yet it is the local assistant who comes to Yoshii's aid amidst the torch and pitchfork brigade, presenting himself as far more than a mere village simpleton, but rather a well-connected and resourced young man with a vested interest in Yoshii's success, or rather, the success of our modern-day systems.

Who Can We Trust?

I came to find it challenging at first to try and get to what Cloud was trying to communicate, but as is usually the case, post-viewing reflections usually bring about some interesting theories. To my mind, Cloud is a social commentary concerned primarily with the concept of trust in our digital age. Indeed, society can only operate with different sorts of trust that transform based on the particular social context. The employee/employer relationship, for example, has and insists on different dynamics than the trust between, say, lovers and/or friends, and stranger still is the trust of online sellers and buyers, mask-wearers engaging with one another whilst hidden behind additional digital masks.

By confronting Yoshii, his attackers come to show themselves as flesh and blood, not merely pseudonyms typed across thumbnails. And by presenting the consequences of, arguably, unethical business practices, they present an opportunity for reflection, repentance, and possibly even reparations. Indeed, the real state of affairs perhaps repositions the drudgery of a nine-to-five existence as almost ideal, aligning well with the biblical principle that a little by honest means is better than a lot by dishonest ones. Perversely, Yoshii's attackers take the extreme route to establishing this fact along with human connection as a whole, whereas Yoshii's assistant (or more accurately, former assistant) represents a part of the current world order that looks to encourage the bottomless consumer dynamic that makes the world go round. By killing, and indeed showing Yoshii how easy it is to kill, the young man steers his former employer back into the realm where the 'profits at all costs' ethic reigns king.

In hindsight, the concept of trust continued to fascinate me regarding this specific offering, the final scenes driving home the push-and-pull dynamic of our present lived experiences. And yet, in the final stanza, Yoshii seems to reject the glasses of John Carpenter's 'They Live', and chooses to forge ahead with his reselling business, despite everything that happened. His assistant fulfils the mission of keeping the blinders on in the end, which serves as an interesting outcome when one considers that Yoshii had stated his distrust of his assistant outright in an earlier scene before giving him his severance pay and a nice boot out the door.

The choice is augmented so much more considering Yoshii's final words: "So this is how you get into Hell", a poignant realisation that perhaps would've rang more accurate if the declaration acknowledged that we are already all living in hell. The hell of easy consumption, and digital connectivity that only further isolates and drives us apart. I enjoyed this particular interpretation of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, even if I felt the transitions and foundations of the events/phases were not well established to truly give more meat on the bone. The film is still good to watch as a reminder of the spell that entrances us all, as well as the choice we are presented with daily to intelligently and soberly navigate within it. Happy viewing, all.