Tag: Ippei Shigeyama

Musicophilia (ミュジコフィリア, Masaaki Taniguchi, 2021)

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What is “music”? Adapted from the manga by Akira Saso, Masaaki Taniguchi’s Musicophilia (ミュジコフィリア) finds its heroes grappling with a series of conceptual insecurities attempting to draw lines around what the what word might mean while torn between conservation and innovation as they struggle to find their own voices. Yet as the hero comes to realise, you can’t make music on your own letting go of his resentment and childhood trauma to remember his natural love of sound while repairing his relationship with his estranged half-brother in the wake of his father’s death. 

Gifted the talent of synesthesia in the ability to perceive shape and colour in the sounds of nature, Saku (Kai Inowaki) harbours a deeply held resentment towards “music” which he believes destroyed his family life, his mother (Misuzu Kanno) having been seduced by well-known composer Kishino (Kanji Ishimaru) as a student and thereafter forced to give up her dreams of becoming a professional cellist. Though he had contact with his father in his childhood, his stepmother never missed the opportunity to make him feel inferior while her own son, Taisei (Ikusaburo Yamazaki), became his father’s protege. Saku was not even allowed to touch his piano as if he were somehow unworthy of his artistic legacy. Having enrolled in art school in Kyoto, he nevertheless ends up being adopted by the contemporary music club which practices avant-garde and experimental techniques only to re-encounter his brother who is now in the third year of a PhD and an unpleasant elitist privately insecure about his musical talent. 

Everyone agrees that Taisei’s playing is technically perfect, but somehow dull lacking the individual spark of a true creative genius merely a carbon copy of his father’s teaching. Saku’s new friend Nagi (Honoka Matsumoto) compares Taisei’s skill unfavourably with the untrained talent of his brother, insisting that Saku’s music has the colour of joy and shape of kindness while Taisei’s sounds like notes arranged by a machine. Taisei is indeed cold and arrogant, snapping back at Saku’s question “what is music?” with the reply that music is what he’s played, as if he owned it and it only belongs to him. He even breaks with protocol and insults his professor claiming that his criticism is down to “internal politics” because he and his father did not get on, publicly criticising his translation of a German textbook on music telling him to “grasp the fundamentals of language” while his professor urges him to master the fundamentals of composition rather than arrogantly insisting his playing is unimprovable because it is the definition of “music”. Of course, some of this is his own insecurity afraid he can’t match up to his father and worried that in the end all he is is a poor imitation. For his part, Saku is often less than kind to Taisei, Nagi trying to point out to him that he’s better that but simultaneously finding him heading in the same direction as he tries to overcome an internal insecurity in order to rediscover his musical voice while unfairly lashing out at those around him. 

Taisei sucks the joy of out music, and indeed everywhere else, through his arrogant perfectionism his treatment of violin-playing girlfriend Sayo (Noa Kawazoe) approaching the abusive as he consistently runs her down and blames her for his own sense of dissatisfaction, while Nagi meditates on how freedom can make you lonely, herself seemingly the only one who thinks she’s in a musical, as the youngsters find themselves isolated by their own desire for artistic expression. Yet what the two men discover is that their father may have intended something else for them and that his desire was that they’d rediscover the innocent connection they’d had as children able to help each other should they become stuck either in life or in music. Saku’s natural talent is born of being immersed in the world around him realising that this too is “music” while Taisei struggles to move forward too obsessed with technical perfection to allow his music to breathe only rediscovering his humanity after an immense humbling that allows him to re-immerse himself in the natural world. At heart a coming-of-age tale in which two young men learn to put their differences aside and rediscover their childhood bond, Taniguchi’s gentle drama also offers a mild critique of academia and the tendency of institutions to exploit and manipulate talent only to wash their hands of it if something goes wrong placing funding above ethical concerns but eventually discovers that music is everywhere if only you’re willing to listen.

Musicophilia streamed as part of the 14th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Moving (お引越し, Shinji Somai, 1993)

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The title of Shinji Somai’s 1993 coming-of-age drama Moving (お引越し, Ohikkoshi) quite literally refers to the process of vacating one space in order to inhabit another but also to the heroine’s liminal movement into a space of adulthood while caught in the nexus of a recently destabilised society itself in a state of flux. Not only must she process the disruption of her father’s decision to leave the family home, but its wider implications that will one day leave her orphaned while coming to accept that such partings are only a part of life to borne with stoicism and sympathy. 

At around 12 or so, Renko (Tomoko Tabata) finds herself on the brink of change. Not only is she beginning to grow up, soon to be changing schools, but is also facing a further destabilisation of her home as her parents prepare to separate. The tension in the household is clear from our first meeting with the family as they sit around an almost violent, green triangular table the point aimed straight at us with Renko at the opposite end and her near silent mother and father on either side. As she often will, Renko attempts to parent her parents, repeatedly criticising her father for his poor table manners wondering if he’ll be able to take care of himself when living alone while later remonstrating with her mother for having had too much to drink while cautioning her to mind what the neighbours might think. 

Already unbalanced by the economic shock of the bubble bursting, the Japanese society of the early 90s was also changing evidenced in part by the separation itself. Divorce is still a minor taboo, even Renko herself had taken part in the shunning and bullying of another girl who’d transferred to their school after returning to her mother’s hometown following her parents’ separation, but this is perhaps the first era in which it becomes acceptable to end a marriage solely because one or both parties is unhappy rather than there being some additional pressure that endangers the family. “Marriage is survival of the fittest”, Renko’s mum Nazuna (Junko Sakurada) later exclaims during a heated exchange but we can also see that the marriage itself was already unusual perhaps uncomfortably suggesting an altered power balance and shifting gender roles led to its breakdown. Father Kenichi (Kiichi Nakai) had previously worked from home completing many of the domestic tasks while Nazuna had become the breadwinner with a successful career earning higher salary. She complains that when she was pregnant with Renko Kenichi sniped at her for not contributing to the household financially but changed his tune when her economic success undercut his sense of masculine pride. 

Despite apparently embracing her freedom Nazuna nevertheless seems to resent Kenichi for leaving, accusing him of deserting his family while he later floats the idea of trying again but only perhaps because he is feeling the ache of the loss of the home he previously hinted suffocated him in responsibility. Meanwhile, Renko is also forced to process the fact that a family friend, Yukio (Taro Tanaka), on whom she’d had an innocent childish crush, is engaged to be married. Overhearing their conversation she also learns that his fiancée is pregnant but unsure about having the baby. Given all of these changes, she begins to wonder why it is she was born, intensely anxious in potential parental abandonment while witnessing the remaking of her home. 

Yet to cure her of her anxiety Somai removes her from her environment, Renko once again taking on a parental role in borrowing her mother’s credit card to book a hotel and train tickets to a familiar destination they’d previously travelled to as a family. It’s in this liminal space that Renko begins roam, eventually encountering an old man with some important life lessons while undergoing a spiritual odyssey of her own as she weaves through a summer festival towards an ethereal encounter with her past self and the spectre of her future orphanhood. Somai’s characteristically lengthy tracking shots add to the sense of destabilisation, Renko’s world constantly in motion yet as she tells us herself she’s on her way to the future, moving on but on a more equal footing and discovering at least a sense of equilibrium in an ever shifting society.

Moving screens at the BFI on 29 December as part of BFI Japan.