Tag: Kiyoshiro Ishida

The Garden Apartment (ガーデンアパート, Umi Ishihara, 2018)

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Can one escape from the loneliness of being alive, or is melancholy longing an unavoidable companion of existence? Two very different women attempt to answer this question, perhaps unknowingly, in the debut feature from Umi Ishihara, The Garden Apartment (ガーデンアパート). Love becomes a destructive force which binds them both in different ways in its elusive yet unattainable allure, yet if escape exists perhaps it lies in acceptance of emotion’s transience rather in the permanence of a single moment of connection. 

Our heroine, Hikari, is a young woman at a crossroads. She’s been living with her boyfriend Taro for some time and has recently discovered that she is expecting their child. However, the couple are also struggling in a still stagnant economy. Taro is currently unemployed and, from Hikari’s point of view at least, not trying hard enough to find a stable job of the kind he will need to become a responsible father. Taro, however, does not seem worried because he’s long become used to relying on the financial assistance of his eccentric aunt, Kyoko. Kyoko married a wealthy man who sadly passed away at a young age, leaving her rich but sad and with no children of her own. Ashamed of himself and embarrassed by his aunt’s lifestyle, he’d not planned on introducing her to the mother of his unborn child but ends up doing so when she unexpectedly accosts them in a coffee shop. Things take a turn for the strange when Kyoko decides to invite Hikari to her home where she hosts “parties” for young women who want to have fun together in a safe space. 

Kyoko’s entire existence is founded on the idea of retreat, a way of living in an imagined past where she is in no pain. Her hedonistic household is filled with youngsters in a similar position all looking simultaneously for escape and for a place to belong. Kyoko drinks, so she says, not to forget but to remember, as a means of slowing down time. She wants to live inside love in memory of her late husband whose loss she cannot overcome and whose presence she feels to be slipping away from her. Sure that no one would ever love her, she clings to the last vestiges of a long absent love rather than submit herself to the loneliness of her later life. 

Nevertheless, the kind of parties Kyoko throws are the kind which only make you remember just how lonely you really are. Hikari, fed up with Taro’s vacillations, arrives at Kyoko’s only to abscond with her only male guest, Sekai, for an unfulfilling late night adventure. Hikari was seeking escape through love, but discovered that love was a finite thing which must eventually run its course. Nevertheless, she appears to have taken little pleasure in it and has come to the conclusion that desire only breeds pain. Love didn’t save her, it only brought her fear and a desire for solitude.  

Meanwhile, Taro tries to retrieve his love from Kyoko’s world only to discover she has chosen her own path, drifted away from him and the life he assumed they were building together. He attacks Kyoko for her lovelorn eccentricity, her jealously, and her need for affection in her treatment of him as a surrogate son (a role now seemingly ambiguously played by Sekai who seems to be just as conflicted as the increasingly petulant Taro) but has little real intention of assuming his responsibilities as an expectant father. 

Kyoko seeks escape through growing herself in nostalgia and the false friendships of disenfranchised youth while Hikari becomes intent on moving forward in an acknowledgment of life’s despair rather than intent on fighting it. Love may be a temporary illusion trailing a wake of self-destruction but there’s something to be said for knowing when it’s time to wake up. Ishihara frames her tale in the mundanity of an ordinary struggling existence alternating with the melancholy neons of Kyoko’s world of night peopled by fugitives like herself looking for an escape from life’s suffering but finding themselves imprisoned all the same. There may be no salve for sadness, but a life must run its course and, in the end, we are all alone.

Mechanical Telepathy (メカニカル・テレパシー, Akiko Igarashi, 2018)

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Many, though not all, people have an interior monologue but what if you could converse directly with an image of yourself, a mental avatar who could talk and move around and might have opinions you would not expect to hear yourself say out loud? The scientists at the centre of Akiko Igarashi’s Mechanical Telepathy (メカニカル・テレパシー), a re-edited version of her 2017 feature Visualized Hearts, are working on a machine that can create a physical simulacrum of a mental image. No concrete reason is given for their research save that of one assistant who suggests its capacity to help those who can no longer communicate physically have a voice, but what quickly becomes apparent is that a self-created image may not be entirely reliable while the images of it held in other minds may differ in interesting ways. 

Each of these philosophical questions begin to occur to scientist Mazaki (Ryuichi Yoshida) when he’s seconded to a research project as a kind of corporate spy on behalf of the business-minded boss who wants to put the product on the market as soon as possible despite the reservations of lead researcher Dr. Midori Mishima (Nanami Shirakawa) whose husband Soichi was injured in a previous experiment and is currently in a coma. Midori’s interest in the machine is then in its capacity to save her husband either by retrieving his bodily consciousness or preserving the image of him captured inside, improving and enhancing it until the point of communication. 

But then as Mazaki comes to realise, perhaps the image of Soichi (Yoshio Shin) in the machine isn’t coming from his mind at all but from Midori’s in which case he doesn’t know anything she doesn’t know already and is in a sense inaccurate, composed only of her memories of him and necessarily limited in possessing the information she does not have even of this man whom she obviously knew intimately. Meanwhile, Mazaki also begins seeing an avatar of Midori, but is unsure if it originates from her mind, that of the comatose Soichi, or indeed his own as a means of confronting him with the desire he may feel for her. His image of himself meanwhile is scathing and self-loathing, challenging him over his various acts of moral cowardice in his essential inability to communicate his true feelings. Only assistant Asumi (Ibuki Aoi), harbouring a decidedly obvious crush on him, is brave enough to take him to task looking her own avatar in the eye and explaining that she has nothing to fear from herself. “If you don’t say it out loud no one will hear you” she explains though it’s a lesson that Mazaki in particular finds difficult to learn. 

As for the avatars themselves, are they representations of particular people or indeed something new and different subject to influence and interference? The mind is supposedly free of time and space but that may not be an entirely good thing. What the machine posits is the separation between mind and body as if a soul could be sheared while it becomes difficult to say if the loss of corporality is liberation or imprisonment while Mazaki wonders if it’s right for a mind to exist without a body. If we can’t trust these images we have of others can we really trust those we have of ourselves which may be largely created through the way that others see us and we them? Complaining he can no longer distinguish whose mind he’s looking at, Mazaki finds himself caught in a moment of existential confusion amid several differing realities his own mind can no longer order. 

This sense of dissociation is perhaps replicated in Igarashi’s detached camerawork set amid the clinical glass and steal environments of the Kobe research institute where the experiments take place, the muted colour palette reflecting a sense of emptiness in the hearts and minds of the scientists who ironically remain incapable of direct communication. The near future production design similarly lends an air of sleek modernity to the otherwise vacant space while perhaps creating a sense of the supernatural in the lightning crackle inside the machine, its tangling wires a digital recreation of an analogue nerve system. A philosophical examination of the representation of the self, its projections literal and metaphorical, and the impossibility of knowing oneself or others Igarashi’s sci-fi drama eventually suggests that perhaps we are all in an empty room talking to ourselves incapable of understanding let alone expressing our true feelings.