Tag: Nippon Connection

Remembering Every Night (すべての夜を思いだす, Yui Kiyohara, 2022)

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“It all looks the same here, it’s easy to get lost” a young man remarks on giving directions to a middle-aged woman who explains that she’s lived in this town for a long time but never been to this area before. Yui Kiyohara’s wistful drama Remembering Every Night (すべての夜を思いだす, Subete no Yoru wo Omoidasu) takes place in Tama New Town, which is as its name suggests a planned development on the outskirts of Tokyo and home to a large number of danchi housing estates which once symbolised a bright post-war future but now seem increasingly old-fashioned and in their own way lonely. 

Loneliness is an underlying theme in the lives of three women whose paths intersect over the course of a day one of whom, gas inspector Sonae, runs into an old lady who talks her ear off about how it’s not like it was when she and the other residents of the danchi were all young together and minded each other’s children to juggle work and domesticity. Now there are only old people, like herself, left. The man next-door, Mr Takada, has gone missing and is later found returning to a different home perhaps one he lived in many years ago in search of a wife who it seems may no longer be living.

They are all in a way looking for something. Chizu, whose name is ironically a homonym for “map”, is looking for several things and not least among them a job after being laid off from a kimono shop which is apparently short staffed without her. As she explains, today is her birthday and she feels like doing something “different” which is perhaps why she travels to another part of town clutching a change of address card for an old friend she’s otherwise lost touch with. She does indeed do several “different” things such as climbing a tree to retrieve a shuttlecock for a pair of mystified children who eventually walk off in embarrassment, and copying the dance moves of a young woman practicing in the park.

The young woman, Natsu, whose name means “summer”, like the children describes Chizu as “creepy” but like her is searching for something from the past in trying to come to terms with her grief over a friend who died the summer before. She visits his mother and tries to return the receipt for photos she had developed that Dai had taken before he died only for her to refuse to take them, explaining that she has plenty of photos that he took but ironically few of him. Natsu later tries to pick the photos up only for the sullen man at the store to suggest she’s waited too long and he might not have them anymore later looking through them himself in the back room where he converts analogue videos to digital. 

There is something poignant in the old home videos from 80s and 90s each featuring birthdays of small children doubtless now old enough to have children of their own appearing like ghosts from another era to remind us that time is always passing. After visiting an exhibition of Joumon pottery with her friend, Natsu wonders whether anyone will remember Dai in thousands of years’ time engaging in an act of remembrance lighting fireworks in the park as if reclaiming the memory from the photos she couldn’t bear to collect. The other women each end up alone, pondering past regrets in the darkness of a summer night on the edges of a city trapped in a labyrinth of memory in an almost imaginary landscape. 

The deliberate sameness of the Tama New City environment lends it an uncanny quality of otherworldliness, as if it had no real borders and the life here went on forever. It seems to us that Mr Takada has got the wrong house, but perhaps it’s us who’ve got the wrong world. Sonae soon discovers that the gas metre’s still running even though there’s no contract for that address while its seeming emptiness is undermined by the pot of fresh flowers growing happily on its doorstep. Perhaps the resident is, like these women, simply living their life largely invisible to us and just another presence that may one day cross ours whether we notice or not. Told with breezy serenity, Kiyohara’s playful summer drama circles the unreality of the everyday but finds in it a kind of comfort if perhaps tempered by melancholy. 

Remembering Every Night screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Son (二十歳の息子, Ryuichi Shimada, 2022)

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“It is simply how it should be” the father of the protagonist of Ryuichi Shimada’s documentary A Son (二十歳の息子, Hatachi no Musuko) remarks, explaining a concept of unconditional love to the 20-year-old man his own son has just adopted. The documentary never quite answers the question of exactly why Yuki made the decision to legally adopt Wataru aside from perhaps suggesting it’s a way of rejecting his own indifference to injustice, but otherwise attempts to draw comparison between the prejudice faced by members of the LGBTQ+ community and that towards children who grew up in the care system.

As Yuki later says, both LGBTQ+ people and foster children develop a habit of scanning people’s faces and watching out for any offhand remark they may make that would tip them off to the fact they are not a safe person to be open with. As he later relates, Wataru never knew his birth parents and suffered abuse in the care system. Looking for a place to belong, he ended up joining a biker gang, getting involved in petty crime, and being placed in juvenile detention which has left him with a criminal record. Even so, Yuki seems to have unshakeable faith in Wataru and is determined to provide him with a safe space and sense of permanency he hopes will allow him to feel a greater sense of confidence and security. 

In an outreach session, Yuki reveals that he knew he was gay from around 14 years old struggled to accept his sexuality after seeing the word “abnormal” listed under the dictionary definition of homosexuality. He too became violent and considered taking his own life which might explain why he empathises so strongly with Wataru, only he chose to come out to his parents instead who didn’t care at all and continued supporting him just the same. As his father later says, that’s just the way it should be. Yuki didn’t suddenly stop being their son just because he told them he was gay and all they ever wanted was his happiness. As parents, they support their children in whatever they want to so so if Yuki believes in Wataru then they’ll believe in him too immediately welcoming him to the family as their grandson much to Wataru’s mystification. He admits he’s not sure he could be so universally accepting should he one day have children of his own. 

Later in questioning his relationship with Wataru, Yuki explains that he’s also trying to teach him how to be a father in case he eventually becomes a parent but obviously struggles with the difficulties involved in becoming a father figure to man who is already a legal adult who may have ideas of his own and not always want to listen. Wataru can’t quite give a clear answer of why he accepted the adoption either aside from suggesting he wants to escape the social prejudice of being a man without a family, but perhaps also hints that family is what he’s been looking for or at least a place to belong that he can anchor himself to and go for help whenever he might need it. Yuki seems to think that by offering him a literal bed that it will help him turn his life around knowing that he will always have a safety net to fall back on. 

One of Yuki’s relatives nevertheless suggests she thinks Wataru’s optimism is merely “naive” as he pins all his hopes on a showbiz career, doing modelling gigs while working part-time in a cafe. He claims he wants to make something of himself by buckling down and working hard, insisting that his painful past can become a strength in lending him a unique profile rather than remaining something that will always drag him down. Yuki’s desire to become a father figure might also be branded as naive by some while he struggles with trying to find the right approach to allow Wataru to find his own way safe and secure that he’ll always have a home to go to. The documentary ends before it’s really possible to know how well the arrangement has worked out for either party and sometimes struggles to unify its twin themes of the abuses of the care system and a more generalised take on social prejudice towards minorities such as the LGBTQ+ community and orphans but nevertheless presents a broadly inspirational tale of intergenerational solidarity and the power of unconditional parental love. 

A Son screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

TOCKA (タスカー, Yoshitaka Kamada, 2023)

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The man at the centre of Yoshitaka Kamada’s bleak social drama Tocka (タスカー) claims that he no longer knows why he’s alive, but as the woman he’s just asked to kill him replies no one else really knows either but even so they continue to live. Set in the northernmost reaches of Hokkaido where you can pick up Russian-language radio and it’s not unusual to spot signage in Cyrillic, the film’s title is taken from a Russian word that describes a quality of spiritual agony that manifests as listless ennui while its sensibility seems to be very much in tune with that of 19th century Russian literature. 

This indeed a cold a barren place almost devoid of signs of life. The heroine, Saki (Nahana), has returned in flight from the implosion of her life in Tokyo but has not told her parents who presumably live not too far away that she’s lost her job or broken up with her fiancé. Instead, she’s living a difficult and dissatisfying life with a part-time job in a local supermarket while contending with massive debts. Unable to see a way forward, she begins to consider taking her own life which is how she ends up meeting Shoji (Kiyobumi Kaneko), a man who wants to die but is unable to kill himself so is looking for someone to help him. 

Perhaps it says something of Saki’s own desperation that she considers his proposal or at least does not necessarily see anything odd about it aside from Shoji’s general vagueness about the reasons he wants to die. Like her, he is living a dissatisfying life but mostly precipitated by the loss of his family and his subsequent descent into alcohol dependency. He used to run a junk shop selling second hand appliances, but his business has also gone bust leaving him with nothing. His only goal is to make sure his daughter receives the payout from his life insurance policy which would be void if it was ruled that his death was a suicide. 

Yukito (Hiroki Sano) also works as a junk man, but scams his clients by pressing them to pay despite advertising a free removals service for unwanted appliances. He also steals petrol to sell illegally on the side and has nothing much going for him in his life while feeling guilty that he has failed to repay the sacrifices his mother made to raise him. Meanwhile, his sister is pregnant and the baby’s father has abandoned them leaving her in much the same position as her own mother but worried she doesn’t have the strength to manage on her own. 

It’s not difficult to understand the reasons why they want to end their lives even if as they sometimes suggest it’s more that they lack reasons to live while those in favour of dying are readily apparent. There doesn’t appear to be much going on in Northern Hokkaido when the businesses seem to be those dedicated to moving around obsolete items, buying junk or selling junk or maybe even stealing junk to sell to people who can’t afford anything better or else for scrap. All three feels themselves already on the scrap heap with nothing more than broken dreams to their names. Saki once wanted to be a singer in Tokyo, but now can’t seem to see a reason to be much of anything at all.

The way she later sees it, it’s alright to want to die and it’s alright to do it too even if you’ll hurt the people you’ll leave behind. None of them are fully able to escape their sense of despair or hopelessness despite the bonds that arise between them as they try to fulfil Shoji’s dying wish. In the end, the firmest expression of friendship is that they will help one another die if and when it’s what they really want though they may never meet again in more pleasant circumstances. In any case, Kamada captures a sense of bleakness in the beauty of the snowbound landscape which remains otherwise barren and defined by emptiness even as those trapped inside it try to find reasons either to live or to die but more often than not find nothing much of anything at all. 

TOCKA screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 KAMADA FILM

Sayonara, Girls (少女は卒業しない, Shun Nakagawa, 2022)

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The end of high school takes on an additional poignancy for a collection of teens who realise they will be the last class to graduate before their school is demolished in Shun Nakagawa’s touching coming-of-age drama, Sayonara, Girls (少女は卒業しない, Shojo wa Sotsugyo Shinai). Adapted from a series of short stories by Ryo Asai, the film’s Japanese title is the more cryptic “girls don’t graduate” hinting at the ghost of adolescence that endures long after a literal graduation ceremony even as the teens find themselves attempting to move on into the “new world” of adulthood which necessarily means leaving youth behind. 

Set mainly over the graduation day itself and the day before, the film focusses on four girls who aren’t particularly connected to each other but are each experiencing differing kinds of adolescent anxiety as they approach the end of high school. Kyoko (Rina Komiyama) is perhaps the most typical in that her dilemma relates to the physical distance that will be placed between herself and her past when she leaves her provincial hometown to study in Tokyo. However, it isn’t the thought of leaving a familiar place for an unknown city that bothers her nor uncertainty in her choices, only that her relationship with her high school boyfriend Terada (Takuma Usa) seems as if it will end on a sour note because of the emotional distance between them as they prepare to take different paths in life. She envisages her future in Tokyo working as a psychologist while he plans to stay local and get a job as a primary school teacher. 

There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that Kyoko would give up her ambitions to stay behind for Terada, and she herself fails to realise that he resents her for choosing Tokyo over him all of which has clouded their final days together despite the inevitability that they will have to end their relationship because the futures they each want for themselves do not align. There is also a slight dividing line between the kids who will not be going on to university at all but plan to look for work, those who plan to attend a local college and remain in their hometown, and those who have won prestigious university places to study in the capital. This is also of course the “graduation ceremony” for the school building itself, which has left Kyoko feeling wistful in realising that she will never be able to revisit this place that in a sense represents her youth. She would rather the building remain and be repurposed while Terada reminds that her romanticism is all very well but as he’ll be staying in the town for the rest of his life he’d rather it be replaced with something more practical like a shopping mall which is really the nexus of the problems in their relationships. 

But on the other hand, for the socially awkward Shiori (Tomo Nakai) the last three years have been nothing but torture, the school building, excluding the library, an unending hell. Yet her regret is that she has been unable to overcome her shyness and with graduation approaching fears that she will never be able to talk to people properly. With the help of her kindly librarian (Kisetsu Fujiwara) even she begins to forge new connections and realise she’s not quite so alone as she thought. Music club president Yuki (Rina Ono), meanwhile, is focussed on making someone else come out of their shell while dealing with discord as other members object to the results of free vote which has elected thrash metal lip synchers Heaven’s Door as the headline act for the graduation concert with the band members, except for one, refusing to play assuming that people only voted for them as a joke. 

Charged with giving the farewell speech at the graduation ceremony Manami (Yuumi Kawai) struggles with a more a literal kind of loss and the stolen futures of those who won’t ever be graduating high school but will be left behind in a kind of eternal youth. As part of her speech she reflects on the “new worlds” each of them will be stepping into and also on the series of encounters and farewells that will occur throughout their lives, but is also well aware of the poignant sense of guilt that comes with moving forward in a way that others never can. As the school will be demolished, in a way so will their youth but only in a less symbolic sense than it is for everyone who must make the difficult transition to adulthood with all the concurrent anxieties that may bring. In a sense the girls do not “graduate” so much as evolve, taking the ghosts of their younger selves with them as they go and leaving behind only a vague shade of their youth that will inevitably fade in time.

Sayonara, Girls screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Single8 (Kazuya Konaka, 2023)

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In a lot of ways, it’s never been easier to make a movie. You can capture sound and image with your phone, edit and add special effects on an ordinary laptop with no particular need for professional grade software or equipment. But on the other hand, perhaps there’s something that’s been lost now that you don’t need to work so hard to overcome technical limitations. Kazuya Konaka’s auto-biographically inspired high school drama Single8 follows hot in the heels of It’s a Summer Film! in pairing the classic summer adventure movie with filmmaking nostalgia while looking back to a now forgotten era of analogue creativity. 

Set in the summer of 1978, the film opens with an homage to Star Wars which has captured the imagination of diffident high school boy Hiroshi (Yu Uemura). Hiroshi is not so much a film buff as special effects enthusiast and is particularly obsessed with figuring out how Lucas achieved the overwhelming sense of scale in his spaceship model shots. Aimed only with a regular, consumer-level 8mm camera, he teams up with a friend, Yoshio (Noa Fukuzawa), to experiment and thanks to the advice of the guy at the camera shop (Yusuke Sato) eventually manages to recreate the scene with a surprising level of dexterity. His new found confidence leads him to suggest they continue with the film as the class project for the upcoming school festival which will be the last of their high school lives. 

The snag is that Hiroshi hadn’t thought much beyond recreating the shot. His previous short film had been called “Claws” and was basically Jaws only with a bear. When people ask him what the film will be about, he looks at them quizzically as if it hadn’t really occurred to him that the plot would be important or something anyone would be interested in. It’s only by teaming up with another student, Sasaki (Ryuta Kuwayama), who actually is a film buff that they begin to come up with their own ideas even if they’re also often influenced by other science fiction films and tokusatsu television series. In a meta touch, the students openly discuss scriptwriting theory remarking that the most important aspect is how the protagonist evolves between the first scene and the last. The film itself and the film with in a film attack this in a similar way, with Hiroshi eventually deciding to end on a note of ambivalence in which it is clear that something has changed if perhaps not obviously. Now no longer quite so diffident, he steps into the role of a director and proudly declares that his next film will be even better than this one. 

Similarly, Konaka avoids falling into the trap of an overly neat conclusion in allowing events to play out in a more natural way than we would usually expect them to in a movie even if Hiroshi is eventually able to win over even the most obnoxious of his classmates, Yoshida. Through making the film together, each of team members including Hiroshi’s crush Natsumi (Akari Takaishi) who plays the film’s heroine grow in confidence and come to understand something of themselves while otherwise having fun and making friends across the last summer break of their teenage lives. The film is a collaborative effort and made with a true sense of generosity with a university student friend of the camera shop guy helping out with special effects by literally carving them directly into the film itself and the high school band Natsumi manages also agreeing to provide the score. 

A true tribute to the charming world of DIY filmmaking in the pre-digital era the film has has a charming nostalgic quality which is only enhanced by the fact that the film within the film, which is eventually shown in its entirety, is actually very good and quite touching in its earnestness. Konaka includes clips of the few of his own 8mm films over the closing credits which adds a meta note to the film’s message that “people should fix their own mistakes” even if there is also an irony in the insistence that they should look to the future rather than obsessing over the past. Using frequent screenwipes as a visual homage to Star Wars but also of course to The Hidden Fortress which inspired them, Konaka’s retro teen drama ends on a similarly ambiguous though less melancholy note than the film within a film filled with a sense of possibility for a new world of creativity which is only just beginning. 

Single8 screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. It will also be screening in New York on 30th July as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: ©Single8 Film Partners

Spring In Between (はざまに生きる、春, Rika Katsu, 2023)

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A struggling editor at a magazine gains a new perspective while falling in love with an autistic artist in Rika Katsu’s romantic drama Spring In Between (はざまに生きる、春, Hazama ni ikiru, haru). Spring is coming in the lives of artist and reporter alike, yet as Haru’s (Sakurako Konishi) professional life begins to come into focus she finds herself romantically confused and ever more obsessed with the mysterious painter while largely unable to ascertain what the extent of his feelings for her may be assuming that he has any at all. 

Haru’s obsession begins when she becomes immersed in one of Tohru’s (Hio Miyazawa) paintings which like much of his work depicts a vast blue sea. Three years on the job, she’s still making rookie mistakes and is constantly berated by her boss who offers little in the way guidance. Nevertheless, she catches a break when he brings her on to assist with an interview of a top artist who is known to be “eccentric”. Never having much exposure to neurodiversity, Haru finds herself captivated but also somehow on the same wavelength while drawn to what she sees as Tohru’s profundity and poeticism. 

The film does at times fall into the trap of fetishising Tohru’s “unique” way of seeing of the world while otherwise keen to lay bare the extent to which neurodiversity continues to be stigmatised. Haru’s partner on the magazine article repeatedly describes Tohru as “odd” in a slightly mocking way, while the journalists assigned to interview him have little patience and do not even bother to hide their exasperation when he flies off on tangents about plastic bottles or tree bark. The magazine is interested in him precisely because of his neurodiversity and learning disability hoping to sell an inspirational story of someone overcoming the odds to find success but in private continue to laugh at him.

Even Haru struggles to comprehend some of the unhelpful information she looks up while researching Asperger’s Syndrome which talks of an inability to empathise leaving her wondering if Tohru has the capacity for romance despite his directly telling her that he has fallen in love before because he is after all human though he never said anything because he did not want to get hurt. A more experienced colleague noticing Haru’s increasingly erratic behaviour tries to give her some advice, but it isn’t to the effect that it might be unethical and irresponsible to fall in love with your subject for a piece but only that she’ll wind up getting hurt because Tohru is autistic and therefore unable to return her feelings, implying that in any case she views a relationship between them as as inappropriate given what she sees as Tohru’s disability. 

In revealing Haru’s own potentially autistic traits, such as her preference to have someone stand on her left and never her right, the film strays into a potentially uncomfortable implication that everyone is a little bit autistic while otherwise trying to eliminate the line has that been placed between Tohru and everyone else. Introducing a romantic rival in the form of an equally eccentric, larger than life photographer who also does not fit into “conventional” society, also implies that neurodiverse people can only date each other while Haru struggles to define her feelings both for Tohru and for uni boyfriend Nao who appears to be both possessive and disinterested telling her that she should get over her left side only thing in the same way some talk about a “cure” for Tohru’s neurodiversity. 

Haru can’t state her feelings any more directly than Tohru can while simultaneously unable to find a way through to him to find out if he likes her at all or is just being friendly and considerate, unlike Nao making a map to figure out the acceptable dimensions of her personal space and promising to always stay at a comfortable angle. Yet in the end it’s curiosity that builds connection, the simple desire to know more about another person and to see the world from another perspective. Promises are kept, and a message delivered if in a roundabout way. As they say, spring will always get there in the end even if summer is right around the corner. A sweet and innocent romance, Spring in Between is as much about self-revelation as it is about mutual understanding and the still currents of a deep blue sea.

Spring in Between screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Mondays: See You “This” Week! (MONDAYS／このタイムループ、上司に気づかせないと終わらない, Ryo Takebayashi, 2022)

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If you got stuck in a time loop at work reliving the same week several times over, how long would it take you to notice? For the harried employees at a small creative agency in Ryo Takebayashi’s Mondays: See you “This” Week! (MONDAYS／このタイムループ、上司に気づかせないと終わらない, MONDAYS / Kono Time Loop, Joshi ni Kizukasenaito Owaranai), sleep deprivation and the mind-numbing sameness of their lives prevent them from realising that events have begun to repeat themselves and if it weren’t for the sacrifice of a suicidal pigeon they never might never wake up at all. Waking up is in many ways the point as the heroine is forced to reflect on the unintended consequences of her corporate drive while conversely accepting that sometimes you do have to take care of yourself for the good of all. 

Yoshikawa (Wan Marui) is on the verge of landing her dream job at another firm, but is determined to see out a particularly problematic project trying to mount a campaign for a miso soup-flavoured soda tablet to please an incredibly picky client. When her colleagues try to explain that they’re stuck in a time loop, she thinks they’re just messing around and ignores them along with their warning not to take a taxi to her meeting because she’ll get into a car accident and hurt her head. After a series of failed attempts, they finally convince her using the smack of a poor pigeon into the office window as a device to snap her out of their collective delusion. 

Amusingly enough, the plan to bust out of the time loop can only be enacted by following office protocol. Yoshikawa understandably asks why they can’t talk to the boss directly to discuss the problem, but soon discovers he won’t listen to her so they have to “escalate” the issue through the proper channels by waking each of the team members in order of seniority so the highest can bring the matter to the boss’ attention. The boss, Nagahisa (Makita Sports), is always the last to arrive at the office, though that might be a moot point seeing as the team are forced to work through the night even at the weekend and in fact rarely get to go home anyway. This level of sleep deprivation might fuel their belief that they’re stuck in a time loop, but equally they soon become to convinced that the boss is more directly to blame in wearing a cursed bracelet and unwittingly stopping time because he’s about to turn 50 and is realising that he has nothing to show for his life. 

As some of the employees remark, it’s like time has been repeating for the last ten years. They find little fulfilment in their work and are often exploited, expected to work extreme overtime which damages both their health and relationships with others. Yoshikawa’s boyfriend is becoming very fed up with her workaholic lifestyle and is on the verge of breaking up with a girlfriend who never has time for him while she throws everything she has into getting her dream job working for someone who tells her success comes to those who put themselves first. 

Yet being forced to work as a team alongside the colleagues she previously looked down on, Yoshikawa comes to a better appreciation of the values of community and recommits herself to pursuing their common goal of escaping the time loop even if it means sacrificing her big job opportunity. Then again, the team have a difficult time getting through to their boss in part because he’s too meek and incapable of putting his own interests first which is why he’s feeling maudlin about turning 50 while filled with regret in having failed to chase his dreams. 

There may be a slight irony in the employees being trapped in their office while trying to vicariously fulfil the dreams of their dejected salaryman boss, but there’s also something quite poignant in the team’s genuine desire to help him out of an existential hole if only so they can climb out too. “There’s not much you can do alone” he admits simultaneously selling both the value of teamwork and the importance of fulfilling one’s personal desires for a healthy and harmonious life in the office and out. Slickly edited and perfectly plotted, Ryo Takebayashi’s quirky time loop comedy neatly satirises the mind numbing absurdities of contemporary corporate culture but ultimately makes the case that there are things more important than work and to find them you’ll need to find a way to escape the never-ending drudgery of life at the office. 

Mondays: See You “This” Week! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. It will also be screening in New York Aug. 6 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Thorns Of Beauty (恋のいばら, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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“Can two women who like the same guy become best friends?” A loose remake of Pang Ho-Cheung’s 2004 Hong Kong comedy Beyond our Ken, Hideo Jojo’s Thorns of Beauty (恋のいばら, Koi no Ibara) finds a jilted ex teaming up with the current squeeze against a no good guy who has compromising photos of each of them he could potentially expose online anytime he feels like it. Not quite everything is as it first appears, yet as they plot revenge against the caddish Kentaro (Keisuke Watanabe) the pair begin to discover a bond that runs deeper than their shared quest for validation.

Momo (Honoka Matsumoto), a mousy librarian, first accosts Riko (Tina Tamashiro), an aspiring dancer who works at a nightclub, on a bus, staring at her intensely until she finally removes her earphones. In truth, Momo never quite shakes an edge of possibly dangerous eccentricity and there is always an underlying doubt that she is telling the truth when she explains to Riko that she and Kentaro were previously an item and he has private photographs of her she fears he may intend to post online. For whatever reason, Riko decides to hear her out and though insisting that Kentaro’s not that sort of guy seems to think there may be something in it. A photographer by trade, Kentaro has in the past photographed her without her consent claiming that he spends all day photographing things other people find beautiful and wanted capture something for himself in his free time. 

Much of the story is filtered through a version of Sleeping Beauty that Momo finds at the library where she works. As the two women bond in their shared quest for revenge, Jojo often plays with the image of them as “witches” lighting them in an eerie green while they dress in black with hats that cast shadows over their faces. Yet we also find ourselves wondering who the sleeping beauty is in this scenario, an unexpected candidate turning out to be Kentaro’s elderly grandmother who has dementia and spends her days collecting shiny things to build a vast fairytale castle. Momo comes to see herself as hoping to wake Riko from a moment of romantic fantasy with a man who in the end doesn’t really care for her which she likely knows but has allowed the relationship to continue mainly out of a sense of inertia. 

But in teaming up with Riko, Momo also begins to awaken from her own low self-esteem in believing herself to be inferior to someone like her. There are times when we wonder if this is going to turn into a Single White Female-style bid at identity theft as Momo seems to idolise her new friend possibly planning to eliminate her and reclaim her place in Kentaro’s life. In the end, however, both women are throughly awakened from their romantic illusions in realising that Kentaro is indeed that sort of person with a hard disk full of pictures of other women just like them while their friendship also begins to take on a distinctly homoerotic quality that clearly runs beyond simple friendship or female solidarity. 

As Momo reflects, Sleeping Beauty is a passive heroine who is asleep for the entirety of her own story. When she’s born, the fairies give her various gifts that turn her into a stereotypical figure of idealised femininity and leave her with nothing to want or strive for. Momo wonders if that doesn’t make her a little boring and if Sleeping Beauty actually wanted any of those things or in the end they were just burden to her. Momo would only be grateful for things she actually wanted like the ability to totally become herself, while Riko reflects on a “past life” as a woman living happily with her two sons by a lake in Switzerland. Cutting through the thorns of their illusions, they awaken each other to a sense of possibility each of them may long have forgotten. Strangely poignant in the touching quality of its central romance along with fairytale allusions, the film in the end allows both women to reclaim an image of themselves from a man who tried to take it from them without ever really bothering to look at it. 

Thorns Of Beauty screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

To The Supreme! (もっと超越した所へ。, Santa Yamagishi, 2022)

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Is it worth staying in a dissatisfying relationship just so that you’ll have someone to carry your rice? The idealist in all of us might want to say no, but it’s undeniably a strong argument. The four heroines of Santa Yamagishi’s To the Supreme! (もっと超越した所へ。, Motto Chouetsushita Tokoro e), adapted from the stage play by Shuko Nemoto, find themselves asking just this question as their relationships with a series of narcissistic, selfish men reach a crisis point on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Opening in early 2020, the film finds costume designer Machiko (Atsuko Maeda) reconnecting with middle school friend Reito (Fuma Kikuchi) who abruptly announces he’s moving in because he’s worried about her given the tone of her late night tweets. Former actress turned variety star Suzu (Shuri) lives with her gay best friend, Tommy (Yudai Chiba), after ending a 10-year relationship with petulant former child star Shintaro (Takahiro Miura) who is now seeing sex worker Nanase (Mei Kurokawa). Miwa (Marika Ito), meanwhile, is in a relationship with vacuous hipster Taizo (Reiji Okamoto) who spent an exorbitant amount of money on gold grills as a present and seems to be very concerned about this new virus going around. 

None of these men have a full-time job and all are (or were at one time or another) supported by their partner who is shouldering the responsibility for rent and domestic bills singlehandedly, not that there’s anything wrong with that in itself if were not such a blatant attempt to take advantage of the women they claim to love. In a flashback to 2018, we discover that Miwa was previously in a relationship with Reito and she’s carried on giving him pocket money every month for the last two years despite having moved on romantically. In his sudden announcement to Machiko that he’ll be stying by her side for the foreseeable future, it’s difficult not to wonder if he’s simply looking for a free place to stay especially as he largely continues to mooch off her while doing so claiming his live streaming channel is sure to take off soon. 

Shintaro had similarly been supported by Suzu during the time they lived together and put on a big show of letting her kept the apartment when he left even though the apartment was hers anyway because it was her name on the lease and she paid the rent while he wasn’t working. More practically minded, Suzu had been taking jobs that paid in light entertainment and variety only to be branded a sellout by Shintaro who was nevertheless jealous of her success. A former child star, he feels humiliated taking bit parts and even working as an extra but talks a big game to Nanase whom he often brands “stupid” and looks down on for being a sex worker. He makes her shout out that he’s the best actor as she climaxes and quizzes her about foreign directors when she says she struggles to watch the films of Shunji Iwai because they make her wonder if there’s something wrong with her eyesight. When she genuinely tells him that she enjoyed his “performance” after spotting him as an extra in a movie, he tells her that a sex worker’s opinion doesn’t count despite having been paying for just that kind of validation the entire time. 

Suzu runs into a similar problem in developing feelings for Tommy who rejects her in an incredibly insensitive way when she tries to make a move on him. During a heated argument, Tommy yells at Suzu for ruining all his plans because he wants to start a family and was intending to marry a woman Suzu being a prime candidate. The film flirts with but does not really get into Tommy’s internalised homophobia in which he seems to regard his sexuality as a barrier to achieving the life he wants given the still conservative culture has not yet legalised same sex marriage and makes life difficult for same sex partners who want to raise children together. He lets himself off the hook suggesting that his sexuality permits him to be “selfish” while admitting that he too has taken advantage of women’s feelings for him without really giving much thought to their own. 

Taizo is much the same. On the surface, it looks like he is genuinely solicitous of Miwa though it’s really more that he doesn’t want to get sick himself or be responsible for looking after someone who is ill. When Miwa goes to the hospital thinking she may be pregnant, she gets some other distressing news but all Taizo can do is focus on himself not wanting to accept the responsibility of becoming a father. When she looks to him for comfort, he fixates on his own relief. These men are selfish, self-involved, proud and fragile in their masculinity requiring the women in their lives to take care of all their basic needs without lifting a finger to help. But the film doesn’t quite let the women off the hook either, a sudden coup de théâtre bringing them together to reconsider making clear that they themselves enable the men’s behaviour by forgiving them if in part because they expect little better and having someone around who could theoretically help out, for example by carrying heavy bags of rice home from the store, might make life easier even if they never actually do it. Witty and slickly edited, Yamagishi ends with a sudden intrusion of eijanaika dancers as if literally to say “what’s wrong with that?”, which might present a rather cynical view of contemporary romantic relationships but one that is also admittedly difficult to argue with. 

To The Supreme! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mountain Woman (山女, Takeshi Fukunaga, 2022)

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A young woman charged with disposing of the corpse of an infant has only a few words to impart as she lowers its body to the river, “Don’t be born human in your next life.” Set in late 18th century Tohoku where famine ravages the land, Takeshi Fukunaga’s bleak fable Mountain Woman (山女, Yama Onna) sees humanity in extremis pushed to its most inhumane but also offers refuge in spirituality and a retreat to a less sophisticated existence. 

Calling this existence sophisticated might be a stretch, but there is more than a little constraint attached to the idea of community in this typical farming village in a feudal society. Bad weather has produced two poor harvests, and the villagers are beginning to feel desperate. As the film opens, a woman goes through a painful and traumatic labour only for the midwife to silently offer a cloth to her husband (Takashi Yamanaka) who ignores her pleas and smothers the child. They have nothing to feed it, and perhaps a part of him thinks it’s kinder this way. A young woman, Rin (Anna Yamada), waits outside for the inevitable and accepts a few coins to spirit the baby’s body away. Rin’s family is shunned by the other villagers because of a crime her ancestors apparently committed, and it’s for this reason that they deal with the dead. 

When it comes to handing out the rice rations, the village chief gives Rin’s father Ihei (Masatoshi Nagase) only half but justifies it as a kindness explaining that he is entitled to nothing because his family owns no land (it was taken from them because of their ancestral crime) but even those tainted with the legacy of criminality are still considered part of the community and so they are doing what they can. It’s this liminal status that begins to eat away at Rin. She’s expected to support a community that as she later says considers her less than human and gives her nothing in return. When her father is caught stealing from the rice reserves, she selflessly claims responsibility and Ihei lets her, savagely beating his daughter in front of the village elders as if he thought that might be enough to settle the matter.

It’s at this point that Rin decides to leave the village, taking off her sandals and leaving them at the gate to imply that she has been “spirited away” though everyone likely knows she has walked into the mountains to die. Several times we see her gazing at Mt. Hayachine which is where locals believe souls go after death, praying to its goddess who was herself apparently a thief and sympathetic to those who find themselves in moments of desperation. As Rin tells her younger brother who is rejected by the community because he is blind, the goddess Hayachine accepts everyone the same, good or bad, rich or poor, unlike the hypocrites from the village desperate to find a scapegoat on whom to blame their plight. There is no longer any space for sentimentality in their lives. Listening only to an old shamaness who claims to be in contact with the gods, they squabble amongst themselves for what little that remains before deciding they must sacrifice a virgin girl to the Weather God to end the bad harvests. 

But what Rin discovers in the mountains is freedom in simplicity. Having broken a taboo in stepping beyond the Mountain God Stone, she is freed from the constraints of “civility” and later tells a man who has come to rescue her that she has no desire to return for only in the mountains has felt herself to be a true human being. She encounters another person there she assumes is the mysterious Mountain Man (Mirai Moriyama) and is kind to him though he never speaks and shows her only silent comfort. It may be this that later saves her life in a fable-like moment that frees her to return to the mountain and the only place she has ever felt alive, but also says something of the inhumanity of so-called civilisation that only in a “savage” land can she find comfort and serenity. Often shot in crushing darkness contrasted with the overwhelming light and beauty of the forest, Fukunaga’s bleak tale of human selfishness implies that only by shaking off the false sophistication of an oppressive “civilisation” can one discover true humanity.

Mountain Woman screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Images: ©YAMAONNA FILM COMMITTEE