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Three women contending with a legacy of patriarchal failure and male violence circle around each other in the picturesque hot springs resort of Ureshino in Aimi Natsuto’s etherial drama, Saga Saga (緑のざわめき, Midori no Zawameki – Saga Saga –). Less playful than Natsuto’s previous film Jeux de plage, the oscillating action takes on a poetic, mystical direction as the forces which bind the three women together eventually become clear while each in their own way tries to overcome a lingering sense of displacement and loneliness.
The first of them, Kyoko (Rena Matsui), left Ureshino to become an actress in Tokyo but has given up performing and resettled in nearby Fukuoka where she runs into an old hometown boyfriend, Sotaro, who is currently sort of dating Eri, a woman he met on a dating app. Despite telling Kyoko he can’t stay long after reconnecting because he has a date with someone who is “not quite” his girlfriend, Sotaro ends up going to a love hotel with another woman, Naoko (Sae Okazaki), who frequents the bookstore where he works. Though it originally appears that Naoko is jealous of Kyoko and fears she’s missed her chance with Sotaro, we soon realise that she is in fact semi-stalking her for unclear reasons but actually wants to get in touch with someone else and eventually forms a telephone connection with Anna (Sara Kurashima), a high school girl currently living in Ureshino with her aunt, Fumiko (Asuka Kurosawa).
In a way, they are all looking for something that seems to be missing in their lives. For Kyoko it seems to be something like the concept of home as she struggles with a series of sudden changes from the death of her mother two years previously to a brush with cancer in the form of an ovarian tumour she has recently had removed. Fumiko, who was a friend of her mother’s, tells her that she’s on a journey of self-reconciliation and there is indeed something in that as she works over the mysteries of her past while looking for new directions in her future.
Meanwhile, she is plagued by strange dreams of being lost in a forest later telling a friend that she was once sexually assaulted in the woods when she was in high school and has the feeling the person who is chasing in her in her dream may be her father who left the family when she was a child. When she was receiving treatment for the tumour on her ovary, she began to ask herself why she had been born a woman forever subject to threat and patriarchal oppression. On her return to Fukuoka, she undergoes a very strange job interview in which she’s repeatedly assured that “being a woman” she won’t be asked to do anything “difficult” while it seems that being “attractive” is enough to get by in the beginning. Also they warn her that they don’t offer “great maternity leave or anything like that”.
The lives of each of the women have been in one way or another overshadowed by male violence, but it’s Anna’s would-be-boyfriend Toru who is eventually victimised when he’s assaulted by a woman who wanted to bring back a problematic local festival cancelled because of a sexual assault. Toru had been in the forest to consult with some kind of mystic man trying to get him to conduct a ritual to get Anna to like him only to be told it doesn’t really work like that and you wouldn’t want it to anyway. After the assault it’s Toru’s life which spirals out of control when he’s blackmailed into acts of petty crime by the witch-like woman who forced herself on him, while Fumiko too is later forced to pay the price for having kept her secrets and for compassionate reasons attempted to hide the truth from those who most wanted to know.
Finally brought together on solving their individual mysteries, the three women settle on creating a home they can each return to, anchoring themselves as a family as a means of finding stability in a world which is so often in flux in defiance of the destructive forces which connect them. Even Eri admits that in reality she may have been looking for self-affirmation in her desire to find a dating app soulmate as her friends reflect on their terrible romantic experiences which, ironically, include being stalked. In the depths of its mysticism and eeriness, the film nevertheless ends on a note of serenity and the promise of moving forward if paradoxically by making a return.
Saga Saga screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 