After finding out he may only have a few days to live, a young man runs off with a terminally ill teenage girl who has never seen the sea in Michael Arias’s road trip movie, Heaven’s Door (ヘブンズ・ドア). A remake of the German film by Thomas Jahn, Arias’ version explores the impact that impending mortality can have on ordinary person as the pair flee the city looking for a more natural sense of ease and tranquility.
After being abruptly laid off from his job as a mechanic, Masato (Tomoya Nagase) experiences a debilitating headache that sends him straight to hospital. The doctors tell him that he has an inoperable brain tumour and that chemotherapy is unlike to prove effective. He has at most a week to live, most likely a few days, and could die at any moment. While in hospital, Masato ends up running into Harumi (Mayuko Fukuda), a 14-year-old girl also recently told that her condition is no longer treatable. Unlike Masato, Harumi has lived a sheltered life never getting to experience the kind of things that healthy children take for granted.
That may be why Masato finds himself sympathising her, allowing her to try one of his cigarettes and a bit of tequila left behind by the previous inhabitant of Masato’s bed who died of drink. When she remarks that she’s never seen the sea, it gives him the excuse too to cut loose, escape the hospital and set off for a place beyond all the confusion and difficulties of contemporary city life. On walking out of the hospital doors, they spot a fancy sports car and temptation proves too difficult to resist as they drive off with it, little knowing that it belongs to a pair of henchmen working for a dodgy motivational speaker and contains a significant account of money hidden in the boot.
This really is the first sign that Masato has departed from a sense of conventional morality while consumed by desperation in the face of his mortality. Without thinking it through, he stops for petrol and has no money to pay. He attempts to fob the old man off with excuses that he’s forgotten his wallet and will come back with the money later, but the attendant is insistent. Searching the car for money, Harumi unexpectedly finds a pistol in the glove compartment. The old man thinks he’s being robbed, allowing Masato to go along with the chaos by robbing the shop but taking only a small amount of money.
Harumi is more sceptical, not approving of Masato’s actions but still going along with the sense of adventure. Unlike him, she is mostly motivated by curiosity about life and melancholy resignation. When the pair pass through the city, Harumi looks on wistfully at a group of high school girls in their school uniform as if longing for that kind of normality. She tells Masato that she hasn’t left the hospital for seven years, and has spent her entire life being fussed over and protected, so a part of her also wants to escape her mother’s (Hiroko Yakushimaru) control if only temporarily. After picking up a new outfit, she begins cutting her own hair as bold gesture of independence and symbolically reacting her infantilisation.
As they get closer to their destination, however, Masato’s headaches and seizures seem to intensify. The beach for him seems to be associated with death, and he does not actually want to go there. Admitting he doesn’t want to die, Harumi tries to comfort him with reassurances that there’s nothing to fear in death. The final scenes are indeed filled with a sense of peace and tranquility as the two of them sit alone at the beach, in contrast to the chaos of the preceding scenes in which they are chased both by a dogged policeman (Tomokazu Miura) and the gang’s henchmen. Still, perhaps feeling a degree of pit for them, the policeman eventually urges the pair to “never stop running”, allowing them to accept and embrace their deaths in their own way. Filled with small moments of humour, mostly at the police’s expense, the film is more melancholy than maudlin and finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the relationship between Harumi and Masato, bonding in a shared sense of mortality but also discovering a new sense of freedom in their final days.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Harmony – the word itself sounds peaceful. A coalescence of sympathetic sounds, the feeling of wholeness and happiness. However, if given the choice, would you like to live in a world of peace and plenty in which your body is almost government property and your personal freedom is limited in favour of ensuring the survival of the species, or would you rather take your chances with the world as it is complete with its violence, sadness and pain if it meant you could be free to live in which ever way you see fit? Michael Arias’ adaptation of the Project Itoh novel addresses just this question in all its complexity as utopia turns out to have a heavy entrance fee.
