The toxicity of life in small-town Japan is manifested in a giant recycling plant in Michihito Fujii’s poetic drama, The Village (ヴィレッジ). Closely aligned with the noh play quoted in the opening title card, the film charts a young man’s simultaneous blossoming and corruption as he finds himself at the service of a demonic mayor and fighting for his place in a village that doesn’t need him but requires a sacrifice.
In the opening scenes, mist rises over the mountain accompanied by noh recitation before we eventually arrive at a noh recital. These two images would seem to signal a kind of innate Japaneseness which has been corrupted by the presence of the recycling plant despite the economic benefits it’s brought to the area. The mayor, and boss of the plant, Ohashi (Arata Furuta), wants to extend it out across the other mountains in the region and boasts that though there may have been resistance at first now everyone is grateful to them for everything they’ve done for the village.
Yu’s (Ryusei Yokohama) father was the last holdout against the plant and apparently ended up killing a man in an altercation thereafter taking his own life and burning down their family home. Because of the stigma surrounding his father’s actions, Yu has been ostracised by his community and is used as a perpetual kicking bag not least by Ohashi’s thuggish son Toru (Wataru Ichinose) at his job at the plant. His mother has also turned to drink and developed a pachinko problem which has resulted in massive debts to yakuza loanshark Maruoka (Tetta Sugimoto) who’s press-ganged Yu into working at the illegal dumpsite which is how the plant really makes its money.
But his life begins to change when childhood friend Misaki (Haru Kuroki) returns to the village having apparently suffered a breakdown in Tokyo. Misaki’s resurfacing reinforces the purgatorial atmosphere as if everyone here were already dead. Having been away so long, only she immediately embraces Yu and simultaneously bonds with him in their outsider status. Encouraging him at work and at home, Yu gradually becomes more confident but equally dependent on the plant for his newfound status. When he’s suggested as the host of a TV documentary some of the locals object given his family background, but in contrast to his father’s opposition Yu is slowly seduced by the plant and the new life it offers him which seems almost too good to be true like a dream he is sure to be awoken from. In this, he mimics the man in the noh play who falls asleep in an inn and is transported to a world in which he is an emperor. He lives there happily for 50 years only to wake up again back in the inn and realise that really life is just a dream.
Misaki hands him back his noh mask as means of separating himself from the world around him. She says that it forces you to confront yourself, and also perhaps implies a deeper connection with an idealised vision of pre-modern Japan uncorrupted by the greed and cynicism of a man like Ohashi who claims that “position is all that matters.” Toru had told Yu that the village didn’t need him, Misaki and Ohashi say it does though for different reasons. Yet Ohashi darkly suggests that it also needs a sacrfice, and in an odd way just as his father before him it may be Yu who sacrifices himself even at the cost of his idealised life. His encroaching cynicism is directly contrasted with the idealism of Misaki’s younger brother Keiichi (Ryuto Sakuma) who like he once was is meek and diffident yet certain in his idealism and unwilling to along with the lies and wrongdoing that increasingly define village life. Eventually, he leaves the village altogether.
Yu meanwhile achieves his destiny in bringing things full circle, conducting a kind of purification ritual that aims to rid the village of Ohashi’s corruption as symbolised by the giant rubbish tip which is slowly consuming the landscape. Yu’s problem was that he tried to make his life on top of all this filth and toxicity only to realise what the price of that new life might be. Conjuring the strange and oppressive atmosphere of small-town life where past is always present and petty prejudices die hard, Fujii spins a poetic tale of fatalism and redemption amid the misty mountains and ancient chants of a slowly dying village.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 