“Why do people write love letters?” is the question posed by the Japanese title of Yuya Ishii’s latest film, which turns out to be less about romance than the regret that stems from things left unsaid. Love letters, it seems to say, are written more for the writer than the recipient, but can, at the same time, bring about a sense of closure or peace of mind in having communicated something that would otherwise have lingered as an unresolved mystery.
The film is inspired by a real-life incident in which a bereaved family received a letter over 20 years after their teenage son’s death in a train accident from a middle-aged woman who’d had a crush on him at the time but never got a chance to say anything. It is, of course, also drawing inspiration from Shunji Iwai’s seminal 90s romantic melodrama Love Letter in which a young woman sends a letter to her late fiancé she doesn’t expect to be delivered only to get an unexpected reply. After receiving some upsetting news about a medical condition and being reminded of her own first love by her teenage daughter Mai’s (Airi Nishikawa) eerily similar experience, Nazuna (Haruka Ayase) is prompted to write a letter to Shinsuke (Kanata Hosoda), a boy she liked on the train, but eventually decides against sending it, only for it to end up being delivered anyway.
Her medical prognosis is, in some ways, the reason that Nazuna writes the letter, knowing that Shinsuke is already dead, and that writing it will allow her to sort out her own feelings. She says in the letter that there is no one else that she can talk to, though she has a husband and daughter she otherwise struggles to communicate with. She too afraid to tell her daughter that her medical condition has declined and is living in a kind of limbo state with something left permanently unsaid. To begin with, there are hints that Nazuna’s marriage is unhappy with her husband Ryoichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) a perpetually gloomy presence who stays out late drinking alone after work presumably to avoid coming home. Likewise, his gruff instructions to Nazuna that she should give up her vegetable garden and cafe business come off as patriarchal and controlling, though his irritation later seems to be an expression of the pressure lack of communication is placing on the family unit. He wanted Nazuna to give up her vegetable garden out of consideration for her physical condition, but phrased it badly, and later changes tack to help out as he and Mai harvest the vegetables together.
In that sense it’s a little ironic that it’s Mai who is the open communicator and directly asks her mother for romantic advice having also fallen for a boy on the train, though one in her class at school. Nazuna’s letter brings comfort to Shinsuke’s parents precisely because he had been an uncommunicative son and parts of his life remained a mystery to them. Shortly before his death, he had begun to open up, but they are still left with regret that they did not have the opportunity to talk more and left many things unsaid. It’s this realisation that prompts Nazuna to have a serious discussion with her daughter about her health and implications for the future, reducing the sense of distance and anxiety caused by a lack of communication and allowing them to come together as a family.
In the end, the daughter’s first love turns not to be such a big deal and is quickly forgotten in favour of the central messages of making sure you say everything that needs to be said while you can still say it rather than being left with lingering regrets. Mai comes to see her mother less as the “random weed” of her name, and more as a hardy plant that can grow anywhere meaning that Nazuna is still somewhere close by watching over her, so she feels secure in her maternal legacy and family history as she begins to embark on her own story. In its own way, the film itself is a kind of love letter from a daughter to a mother that brings its own kind of healing in bringing the past full circle.
One Last Love Letter screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 