Nicole Ohtsuka – Windows on Worlds

Following on from the dark series of coming of age tales in Plastic Love Story, Ryutaro Nakagawa continues to examine his central themes of unusual connections, lingering effects of past trauma, and the dark side of familial dysfunction in the cheerfully titled August in Tokyo (愛の小さな歴史, Ai no Chiisana Rekishi). Beginning with a framing sequence involving suicide and depression, Nakagawa spins back for a no happier look at two very different people facing much the same problems as they attempt to reconnect with family members, pursue doomed romances, and generally fail to move forward even though they each strive to put the past behind them. Yet there is hope here as the framing sequence proves in its insistence that loss is an inevitable part of life but that the end of one relationship does not mean no others should start.

A young girl, Natusmi (Asaka Nakamura), receives a phone call from the police telling her that her best friend has committed suicide. Left reeling, Natsumi also attempts to kill herself but is saved by a young man with whom she later develops a friendship after bonding over their shared loss in each having lost someone close to them who died by their own hands.

Their story gives way to that of another man and woman who don’t know each other but are living very similar lives in close geographical proximity. Natuski (Eriko Nakamura), having left a job at a book shop following a failed affair, has a part-time job delivering bento. Approached one day by a young man (Sosuke Ikematsu) who tells her that her estranged father (Ken Mitsuishi) is in a bad way, Natsuki decides the best form of revenge might be to move in and look after him. Meanwhile, Natsuo (Takashi Okito) is a petty gangster becoming disillusioned with his life of senseless unpleasantness. Reencountering his younger sister Asuka (Manami Takahashi), Natsuo decides to reassume his familial responsibilities by “saving” her from her dead end life as a drug addicted casual sex worker.

Abandonment and familial breakdown are the threads which bind the stories of Natsuki and Natso together. Living out their eerily similar lives, they each reflect on why it was they were born if their parent(s) did not want them enough to bother looking after them. Natsuki’s memories of her father who left when she was small are not positive. She has a scar on her chest from where he burnt her with a cigarette and still resents him for the drunken beatings he inflicted on her mother who later died when Natsuki was only ten years old. She wonders if her life might have been different if she’d had a normal childhood. A failed a attraction to a middle-class pianist only serves to ram home her sense of insecurity and inadequacy, leaving her to wonder if she can ever escape the cycle of suffering to which her father’s failures seem to have condemned her.

Natsuo and his sister have it harder, each wondering why it was they were born, preferring to think it was all just an unhappy accident of a biological urge rather than the expression of a love they themselves have never felt. At some point Natsuo made the decision to abandon his family, leaving Asuka to deal with it alone. Attempting to care for their abusive father with senile dementia, Asuka’s life was destroyed, leaving her no way to support herself until an ill advised romance led her into the path of drugs and the sex trade. Natsuo wants to put things “right”, but he may be running out of time.

Natsuki and Natsuo struggle, each trying to do the “right” thing but finding themselves conflicted. Natsuki can’t forgive her father for everything he’s put her through. The young man who convinced her to help him, perhaps disconnected himself, describes Natsuki’s father as “like a father” to him – a figure of nobility who stood up for others and was the only man who took him for drinks and spent time with him as a father might. Natsuki says says her only purpose in life is hating her father, yet in the end she can’t. Natsuo’s worries are equally self focussed in his guilt over having abandoned his sister and her subsequent fall into dangerous drug dependency but his late in the day attempts to “save” her and their patronising paternalism often frustrate his essential goal.

Running in parallel these two sad stories are tragedies waiting to happen but, even in their darkness, they hold the potential for salvation. As in the framing sequence, such unexpected connections may be born from sadness but there is happiness to be found if you can find the strength to carry on. Maintaining his familiar aesthetic of naturalism mixed with expressionist dance sequences, Nakagawa’s latest examination of human relationships and contemporary society is bleak but also hopeful, insisting that patch work hearts are the path to a brighter future.

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Trailer (English subtitles/captions)

Fake plastic love, in the words of Radiohead – it wears you out. For three young women in contemporary Japan each seeking an identity through romantic connection, plastic love will have to do, for a time at least. Ryutaro Nakagawa’s indie feature Plastic Love Story (プラスチック・ラブ・ストーリー) is, in essence, anything but romantic as its three heroines veer dangerously between life and death, each lost, lonely, and lovelorn as they search for the pathways to lead them into a settled adulthood. For all of its gentle coming of age qualities, Plastic Love Story is a dark tale in which release is found only through loss, shared pain, and finally sacrifice.

Office lady Eri (Mai Sakata) is about to quit her job as she believes herself to be pregnant. A common occurrence even in modern Japan, though Eri’s case is less usual because she is not married. After confronting the probable father who wants nothing to do with it or her, Eri becomes fixated on a middle school classmate whom she feels was the last person to really understand her.

Meanwhile, high school girl Rina (Manami Takahashi) has a difficult home life with a flighty mother and distressed father. She dreamed of becoming a ballerina but since a leg injury put paid to her dancing dreams, Rina has tried to fill the void left by parental absence and early disappointment by hooking up with a string of useless boyfriends.

Kanae (Yumi Yamawaki), by contrast, is also a high school girl but sullen and depressed. A childhood trauma involving the death of her younger brother who had learning difficulties which was quickly followed by the death of her mother, has left her with an ongoing sense of guilt and hopelessness. Rejecting an erstwhile suitor from school, Kanae develops an odd relationship with a disturbed, suicidal young man currently in her doctor father’s care.

Each of the three women is in some way damaged, attempting to deal with extreme trauma and doing it all alone. Though they do not know each other and never meet, there are strange connections which bind them in their shared sufferings and inability to escape their oppressive environments. Eri’s loneliness is longstanding, leading her to attempt suicide as a schoolgirl at which point she was saved by the kindly attentions of another loner, Yasu, whom she has come to regard as a kind of absent soulmate. Yasu, in a trope which is repeated in all three stories, has since committed suicide but has left behind a series of videotapes through which, his sister says, he was able to make himself understood as he never could without a camera in his hand. The tapes centre on another high school classmate who seems to have been Yasu’s first (unrequited) love. Watching the videos forces Eri to face facts about her non-existent middle school romance and eventually helps her exorcise the ghost of her lonely teenage self.

Rina and Kanae are not quite so lucky, a little way behind on the path and each required to make a sacrifice of their potential mates in order to achieve what Eri achieves though her unattainable soulmate has already passed on. Rina’s life has been one of subservient neediness as she finds herself trapped in unfulfilling relationships with boys who see her only as a sex object. In fact, one of them actually describes her as a “toilet”, but all Rina says she wants is a “normal” relationship which starts as friends and gradually becomes something more. The janitor at her university has an intense crush on her which Rina originally rebuffs but every insane demand she makes of him, the janitor fulfils making more than a few sacrifices of his own.

Kanae’s relationship with the equally guilt ridden, suicidal young man at her father’s surgery is even less positive than Rina’s manipulative romance as the pair bond through their shared self loathing in feeling responsible for the deaths of people close to them whom they feel they did not try hard enough to save. Leaving aside the fact that the man is in his twenties and Kanae still a schoolgirl, the relationship is an intentionally doomed one. Kanae does not seek love but only an end to loneliness, avowing that no one has enough happiness to save someone else but that someday she plans to go faraway and learn to love herself once again.

Taking a turn for the poetic, Nakagawa has each of the women dance happily as they learn to let go of the objects which have bound them, smiling less painfully and walking with a little more lightness. Three expressions of womanhood, they exclaim that now they know love, they know beauty, they know solitude. The path that leads them here is dark, littered with bodies of those they have lost or have sacrificed in order to enact their own happiness. Plastic does not only imply something “fake” or engineered, but something soft and pliable, which is to say it can be moulded for good or ill. These plastic loves have soon turned rotten, but perhaps there is hope for a better future for each of these women for having come through them, even if their escape was not without cost.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Nicole Ohtsuka

August in Tokyo (愛の小さな歴史, Ryutaro Nakagawa, 2015)

Plastic Love Story (プラスチック・ラブ・ストーリー, Ryutaro Nakagawa, 2014)