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Just because we are far apart, it doesn’t mean we aren’t important to each other, according to an interplanetary messenger hoping to avoid the Earth’s apparently imminent destruction in Hideyuki Tokigawa’s gentle ode for world peace, Love Song From Hiroshima (惑星ラブソング, Wakusei Love Song). Twenty-something Mocchi (Ryosuke Sota) says he’s sick of hearing about the legacy of the atomic bomb, but is himself stuck in the past just as the city is frozen in time.
According to his friend Ayaka (Shiori Akita) who is thinking about studying abroad in the US, Mocchi gives up on things too easily and can’t decide on his path in life. Of course, he doesn’t really want her to go to America because he’s in love with her and too shy to say, but agrees to help her with a social media campaign to get over 100,000 likes and impress her boss so he’ll fund her travel. That’s how they end up meeting “John” (Chase Ziegler), a very weird “American” tourist whom they decide to escort around Hiroshima showing him typically touristic things like getting okonomiyaki which they then post on her social media channels.
Meanwhile, a shady American agency is on a UFO alert in Japan which links back to a little boy’s fascination with aliens even though his friends keep making fun of him because of it despite spreading their own kinds of urban legends. Yuya is obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life while also uncomfortable with the scarred city around him. At his school there are a pair of burnt but surviving trees that have become symbols of resilience and survival, though Yuya hates going to the Peace Park and talking about the bomb because it’s scary. According to his mother, his great-grandmother never liked to talk about the war, though it seems she has told the man looking after her at the care home about her carefree childhood of roller skating in the car-free streets. In a brief moment of lucidity, she turns to Yuya and asks him if his aliens can travel in time, why can’t they go back and stop the bomb from falling.
The irony is that Mocchi’s sick of everyone talking about the bomb all the time, but it’s still a painful subject for many including the taxi driver who drives Yuya and his mother home. As soon as she starts talking about what she does know about her grandmother in the war, she can feel him looking back at her in the rearview mirror and changes the subject, promising to tell Yuya the rest later when they’re on their own. In his dreams, Yuya ends up chasing after his great-grandmother as a school girl as she tells him that there used to be sweet shops, a barber’s, and a cinema where the Peace Park is now.
The aliens say that the bomb twisted the fabric of time and space, creating a barrier which they cannot move beyond, while there is another fixed point in the future with seemingly nothing beyond it. We cannot change the past, the aliens admit, but we can change the future. The film’s Japanese title is more like “interplanetary love song”, and it turns out that a universe without the Earth in it is like the world without George Bailey. All the planets that the Earth would have helped will also be lost along with countless other possibilities throughout the universe.
Mocchi still thinks it’s pointless to “pray” for peace, and that as all anyone in Hiroshima ever seems to talk about is the bomb, he doesn’t see how raising awareness could make much difference. Nevertheless, even he can’t help being moved by the aliens’ opening manoeuvre which cures his cynicism by fulfilling the childhood dream he’d more or less forgotten. Mocchi and Ayaka argue about the realities of nuclear deterrents and geopolitical manoeuvring even if they each agree on the horror of war. Ayaka says she loves her city because it represents peace, and it is indeed a kind of love song from Hiroshima that they send around the world as a plea for a world without war. Telling Mochi to come up with ways to enact world peace on his own might seem a little unfair, but then it’s true enough it’s something we all have to think about to save the future from the mistakes of the past.
Love Song from Hiroshima screens 24th June as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 