KIKI – Windows on Worlds

“There is the vast realm of the unconscious,” one of the professors explains to vacant medical student Hiroshi a soon-to-be physician attempting to heal himself from a trauma he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps as the title implies, Vital (ヴィタール) sees Tsukamoto branch out from his vistas of urban alienation to find a new paradise in nature albeit one that it exists largely in the mind and that the hero can never fully return to because this place of life is also one of death which exists inside a kind of eternity.

This explains to some extent Hiroshi’s (Tadanobu Asano) temporal confusion. Having lost his memory following a car accident in which he later learns his girlfriend Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) was killed, he shifts between “reality” and what first seems to be flashbacks of his unremembered past but are actually taking place in a kind of alternate, perhaps idealised reality in the “vast realm of the unconscious” as Hiroshi attempts to reconstruct his image of Ryoko along with that of himself. Another of his professors more philosophically asks were lies the seat of the soul in the human body and is this something that Hiroshi maybe unconsciously looking for during his anatomy classes in which he is coincidentally assigned Ryoko’s body to work on only realising when he sees her tattoo in one of his visions.

In some ways this grim task of dissection is a bid for greater intimacy, to take Ryoko apart and then put her back together as the students diligently do at the end their studies reassembling the bodies and placing them in coffins in keeping with culturally specific death rituals. The faces of the cadavers are covered with a bag until the students are instructed to remove them, but they are always reminded to treat the dead with dignity and that their role here is one of understanding as they attempt to work out not only how these people died but also how they may have lived. Hiroshi causes conflict with some of his fellow students on just this point, seeming rather creepy in his vacant intensity over the body while also wanting to take ownership over that of Ryoko rather than work as part of the group complaining that the others are too clumsy and it’s affecting his ability to learn.

Ryoko’s father comes to say that though he once blamed Hiroshi, his daughter had been in a way dead for a long time before she died, the light apparently going out of her eyes when she was still in high school. Only in Hiroshi’s unconscious does she say that she didn’t want to die despite an apparent obsession with death in Hiroshi’s other resurfacing memories/visions of her as symbolised in her repeated requests for him to strange her during in sex. Another of the professors had said that the suppressed desires of the unconscious could create conflict and this alternate reality is also in some senses Hiroshi’s own latent desire for death, to be with Ryoko in this new paradise that is founded on an idyllic beach rich with nature and sunshine where they are free to be together liberated from the oppressions of civilisation.

Indeed, it’s been raining all through the film as if in expression of Hiroshi’s gloomy mental state but we later learn that Ryoko’s most treasured memory was simply standing in the rain with him and breathing in its scent. Verdant nature is aligned with the vitality that is often absent from the soulless concrete of a city in which everyone seems to exist in tiny, separate worlds which only border on but never join each other. Ikumi (Kiki), a strange female student who develops a fascination with Hiroshi, has an illicit conversation with a professor she’s apparently been sleeping with each of them speaking into mobile phones while standing steps apart. Tsukamoto often isolates the protagonists, placing them in corners or blurring the periphery as if they alone existed in this moment. In Hiroshi’s idealised alternate reality, these barriers disappear as he and Ryoko share an entire world in love and freedom.

The irony is that he resurrects himself through the process of dissecting Ryoko’s dead body. His Da Vinci-like sketches begin to shift as do the ink-like shadows on the wall amid the reflection of the rain as Hiroshi stares vacantly trying to reassemble his past. Through accepting Ryoko’s death, he rediscovers life and is in a sense reborn insisting he will continue medicine even though his professor and parents advise him not to given what he’s just been through though his parents had also said that before the accident they didn’t really think he had it in him to become a doctor. Their disapproval may explain some of the pressures he was experiencing as perhaps was Ryoko that may have urged them to long for death. In any case, what the film presents is the archaeology of grief, a prolonged period of introspection and loneliness and a seeking of intimacy no longer really possible but discovered only in the vast realms of the unconscious.

Vital is released on UK blu-ray 30th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pandora's Box Osamu Dazai is one of the twentieth century’s literary giants. Beginning his career as a student before the war, Dazai found himself at a loss after the suicide of his idol Ryunosuke Akutagawa and descended into a spiral of hedonistic depression that was to mark the rest of his life culminating in his eventual drowning alongside his mistress Tomie in a shallow river in 1948. 2009 marked the centenary of his birth and so there were the usual tributes including a series of films inspired by his works. In this respect, Pandora’s Box (パンドラの匣, Pandora no Hako) is a slightly odd choice as it ranks among his minor, lesser known pieces but it is certainly much more upbeat than the nihilistic Fallen Angel or the fatalistic Villon’s Wife. Masanori Tominaga had made an impact with his debut film The Pavillion Salamandre and seemed to be a perfect fit for the quirkier, darkly comic Pandora’s Box but perhaps in the end it was too perfect a fit.

Inspired by events from Dazai’s own life, the story centres around a young man at the end of the second world war who has been suffering from tuberculosis for some time but kept quiet about it expecting to die soon and remove the burden on his family. However, when the war finally ends Risuke (Shota Sometani) inherits a new will to live and commits himself to a sanatorium to treat his lung condition. Whilst in the hospital he comes into contact with writers and poets as well as pretty nurses all the while proceeding with his plan to become a “new man” for this “new era”.

At once both hopeful and nihilistic, Pandora’s Box mixes gallows humour and denial in equal measure as the motley collection of inpatients waste their days away in this eccentric establishment which looks after them well enough but promises no real progress in terms of their health. Each of the patients receives a nickname when they enter the sanatorium so Risuke quickly becomes Hibari (sky lark). Tellingly, these nicknames overwrite real world personas – original names are recalled only at the time of death. Deaths do indeed occur but aside from these unhappy events, no one acknowledges the seriousness of their condition or the possibility that they may die from it, never leaving the hospital again. Physical pain and suffering is almost entirely absent though Risuke gives ample vent to his mental anguish through his letters to a fellow patient who has now been discharged back into the unseen chaos of the post-war world.

Indeed, the sanatorium might be a kind of idyll in this era of instability. Well fed and well cared for, the patients are far better off than many left adrift in the starving cities but the outside world rarely impinges on the isolated atmosphere of the sanatorium. Events change slightly when a friend of Risuke’s, Tsukushi (Yosuke Kubozuka), is discharged and a new nurse, Take (Mieko Kawakami), arrives stirring up various different emotions amongst the male patients in Risuke’s ward. Striking up a friendship with the younger nurse, Mabo (Riisa Naka), Risuke finds himself torn between two very different women.

Although its tone is necessarily one of depression and numbness, Pandora’s Box ends on an improbably upbeat note in which Risuke remarks that just like a climbing plant he may not know where he’s going, but it will certainly be a place of bright sunlight. A minor work filled with dark, ironic humour it’s perhaps unfair to expect the same kind of impact as Dazai’s more weighty efforts but Pandora’s Box is a lower budget affair which, although interesting enough in terms of direction, fails to make much of an impression outside of its obvious pedigree. The light jazzy score and deadbeat voice over add to the period feel whilst also lending an air of hopeless yet buoyant resignation to Risuke’s ongoing journey into the post-war world. This, in many ways, is what we’re here for – Risuke, unlike Dazai, has made a commitment to forge a way forward in which he plans to fight for the sun rather sink below the waves.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tag: KIKI

Vital (ヴィタール, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004)

Pandora’s Box (パンドラの匣, Masanori Tominaga, 2009)