The match is fixed in Masayuki Suo’s scathing courtroom ordeal. By TIM WONG.

MASAYUKI SUO’s I Just Didn’t Do It, an allegorical black hole generously described as “Kafkaesque”, has more in common with the social and political quagmires of David Simon: its nightmarish scenario about a wrongly accused man deals unflatteringly in the same cruel cynicism and institutional dysfunction of police procedural The Wire, replete with a Greco-tragic underpinning. Here, the target of rage is Japan’s draconian legal system, furnished with a 99.9% conviction rate, and so inflexible that lawyers are consigned to pressing their clients into a hasty confession. Never mind if the defendant is innocent, as is the case with young Teppei Kaneko (Ryo Kase), whose commute on an overcrowded train results in a molestation charge through mistaken identity. Harassed by interrogators, yet refusing to yield to pressure, he is held in custody for months during which the bureaucratic machine inches its way towards prosecution. Meanwhile, Kaneko’s friends and family garner the support of a similarly defamed man fighting his own battle in court, and the noble, if grimly realistic aid of a defense attorney (played by none other than Koji Yakusho).

An airtight courtroom drama austerely photographed and fastidiously edited, the film is sophisticated in its genre routine. Riveting, its compelling legal proceedings – the most gripping of which concerns the groping victim’s emotional testimony, a superbly shot and sustained trial sequence employing as many camera angles as Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men – are drawn out in meticulous chapters (or hearings), all enclosed within the vacuum of a sterile, utilitarian court interior, impervious to the melodrama and hysterics of box office clichés. Just as The Wire sought to expose the inadequacies of network cop serials like C.S.I and Law & Order, I Just Didn’t Do It has its own necessary counterpoint: the wildly popular Hero, a big screen addition to the hit Japanese TV Series, starring ubiquitous J-Idol Takuya Kimura as an improbable street punk-turned-public prosecutor. Suo’s film is the antithesis of this crowd-pleasing legal fantasy: slow, somber, and deeply critical, it is a harsh reality fraught with self-preserving judges, short-sighted detectives, and stats-juking administrators. Short of cheating the system, its genuinely honorable characters must ultimately concede defeat – to the state’s “indifferent gods”, as defined by Simon. Suo, who last directed the uplifting Shall We Dance?, clearly feels different about the country today (then, his statement was modest: to liberate Japanese culture through western dance and self-expression). Now trading in hypocrisy and futility, his film ought to encourage change, though like its doomed protagonist, has the odds well and truly stacked against it.