Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari)

 

 

MABOROSI (Maboroshi no hikari)                           A                                                              Japan  (110 mi)  1995  d:  Hirokazu Kore-eda

A candidate for one of the most poetic and beautiful films ever made, a teardrop inside which all of one’s life can be examined again and again from differing perspectives, drawing parallels in structure and eloquence to Yasujirō Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien, as the motif of trains, telephone wires, tea kettles, and the use of medium shots are a constant, with no close-ups, retaining a respectful distance, evoking the fragility and overall quietness of Naomi Kawase’s SUZAKU (1997), which this film thematically mirrors, both dealing with memory and traumatic loss, while also recalling Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), as each shot in this film feels perfectly chosen, composed with a meticulous eye by Masao Nakabori who favors shooting in natural light.  If there were a director working today emulating this style, it might be Bi Gan, whose luminous works include 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) (2015) and 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan) (2018), particularly in the brightness of the colors red and green.  This is a completely different tragedy, hauntingly sad, but also a nocturnal film with only brief glimpses of light, where there are reoccurring images whose significance takes on the importance of human characters.  The film is a quiet, precise observation of one young woman’s spiritual odyssey recovering from her husband’s suicide, a moving and profound examination of her grief and the impact of death on the living, where Maborosi means illusion or mirage, though the Japanese title is more instructive, Maboroshi no Hikari (The Light of the Illusion).  Screenwriter Yoshihisa Ogita adapted a 1978 short story by Teru Miyamoto, the first feature film by this director, working previously as a documentary filmmaker.  The music by Taiwanese composer Chen Ming-chang (who also provided the score for several Hou Hsiao-hsien films) is hauntingly beautiful in what can only be described as one of the more tender and eloquently spiritual (Buddhist) film experiences ever, moods expressed with a variety of darkness and light, where a poetic emptiness and stillness prevail, which express the absence of life in the heroine, examining the relationship between the visible and the invisible, exteriors and interiors, from which all other activity and purpose comes, carefully revealing the flavor and texture of her everyday life. 

The film opens in the town of Osaka where Yumiko, beautifully played by fashion model Makiko Esumi in her first acting experience, is initially seen as a small child running across a bridge trying to stop her senile grandmother from leaving, convinced she needs to return to her home town to die, leaving the child devastated and forever haunted about being unable to stop her.  The theme is established right away and the bridge becomes one of the early reoccurring themes, a bridge of transport taking her grandmother across to the other side, to death.  Then Yumiko sees an image of a boy her age sitting atop a bicycle, appearing for quite some time in a still light, and she whispers his name, followed by darkness on the screen for some 30 seconds.  The name is whispered again, but this time (as if summoned from a dream) the boy is Yumiko’s husband Ikuo (an early appearance of the great Tadanobu Asano), who flashes on a lamp asking her to go back to bed, flicking the light back off again after gently reminding her, “I’m not the reincarnation of your grandmother.”  The bicycle becomes another reoccurring theme, along with cars, buses, trains, boats, all modes and stations of transit, outside car noises heard from a darkened room, dimly lit stairs, and always a reoccurring theme of light, suggested by the everpresent kerosene lamp and light bulbs.  She sits behind him riding his bicycle in the night, feeling comfortable and happy, even after he resorts to theft after his own bicycle was stolen, both seen happily painting it a new green color.  One day, the husband returns the bicycle on his way to work, preferring instead to walk, seen carrying an umbrella as Yumiko follows him down the stairs, out the door, and watches him walk away, smiling and happy.  But she never sees him again, as, without warning, he walks in front of a commuter train on his way home from work that night, leaving her alone with a 3-month old son, utterly devastated and confused, sitting in an empty room looking at photographs of their life together, spending years afterwards retreating from life.  While grief is a central theme of the film, as it was in his earlier TV documentary HOWEVER… (1991), which similarly follows the repercussions of a suicide, yet here Yumiko is always filmed from a distance, never allowing interior access, which remains shrouded in mystery. 

After the passage of time (all happening offscreen), a second marriage is arranged by a neighbor to Tamio (Takashi Naitō), a widower with a small daughter living with his elderly father (who rarely utters a word, often seen smoking alone) and most of the film examines this new life in the small, coastal town of Noto, a fishing village tucked under snowy mountains, actually shot on location in Wajima and Uniumachi on the northern tip of the Noto Peninsula facing the Sea of Japan (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uniumachi,+Wajima,+Ishikawa+928-0065,+Japan/@37.3994055,136.8518637,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1svAClo8jmtzYPZgrwBXjt7g!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DvAClo8jmtzYPZgrwBXjt7g%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.gws-prod.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D360%26h%3D120%26yaw%3D0%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x5ff12f111ba92311:0x4aefd0bc526d048f!8m2!3d37.3950548!4d136.8508654), arriving to an empty railway platform and a deserted station where no one is there to greet them.  Her new husband apologizes profusely when he arrives late, blaming problems at work, eventually showing her off to the community.  Images of a dark, empty room filled with shoes introduce viewers to the communal festivities of her wedding dinner filled with family and friends surrounding a long table, with plentiful serving of saki and the singing of songs.  There is a wonderful scene of the couple making love on a hot afternoon, completely shadowed in darkness, yet it’s one of the few moments of happiness, ever so briefly revealed, as unanswered questions hover over their lives, including secrets and concealments about the profundity of Tamio’s love for his first wife, described by others as the love of his life, which was never revealed to Yumiko, played with tender grace and a delicate restraint by Esumi in a remarkable performance that barely contains her grief, continually retreating into an interior emotional landscape that defines the film, foregoing plot, mostly told through bold visual choices, using spectacular changes of seasons from winter to summer, demonstrating a meticulous blending of color, shadow, music, and sound effects.  Haunted by Ikuo’s unexplained suicide, Yumiko grows obsessed by a small bell she gave him one day attached to his bicycle key, stirring up dreams and vivid flashbacks occurring while performing the mundane task of sweeping the stairs, invoking ways that loss alters us forever.        

Nothing is wasted by this director, who values simplicity itself, creating a remarkably profound and contemplative film that simply glimmers in its own sublime beauty, creating something close to perfection, where the camera almost never moves, the editing is spare, accentuating sorrow through stillness, effectively revealing the barrenness of the human soul.  Sitting alone in a small, darkened bus stop, the bus comes and goes, yet Yumiko remains fixed and immovable, revealing the stark originality of this filmmaker, spotting a Buddhist funeral procession off in the distance, with the sound of bells, all dressed in black, walking in single file, as the snow falls upon them in silence as they approach the ocean.  Walking some distance behind, Yumiko joins the procession, silhouetted figures against a tumultuous ocean under a darkened sky, but remains apart, separated, and alone, using imagery reminiscent of Angelopoulos, providing a lingering meditation on death, wondering if mourning ever truly ends.  In this hushed quiet of poetic transcendence, her husband searches for his missing wife in his car, driving along the shore, eventually spotting a lone figure standing next to the billowing flames of smoke from a funeral pyre, the smoke reaching up into the sky.  As he approaches her standing by the ocean in a long shot, she turns to him, and they begin walking back, still apart, never joining.  Breaking their silence, filled with heartbreak, she asks, “I just don't understand!  Why did he kill himself?  Why was he walking along the tracks?  It just goes around and around in my head.  Why do you think he did it?”  Tamio calmly answers, “The sea has the power to beguile.  Back when dad was fishing, he once saw a maborosi ⸺ a strange and beautiful light ⸺ far out to sea, and it would be shimmering in the distance, as if beckoning to him.  I think it can happen to anyone.”  In the light of a new day, utilizing another long shot, Tamio is patiently trying to teach her son how to ride a bicycle, holding the shot for a considerable length until it continues offscreen, where the entire town is framed with only the sounds of this small family experience.  Yumiko sits next to the father-in-law on a porch overlooking the sea, and from a dark, empty room inside, a window reveals the ocean, a window to the soul where only from darkness may there be light.

Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo)

Actors Masahiro Higashide (left to right) and Karata Erika with director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi at Cannes, 2018  

ASAKO I & II (Netemo sametemo)       B                    

Japan (119 mi)  2018 d:  Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Premiering at Cannes, this film was overshadowed by other Asian films grabbing the spotlight, Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 Top Ten List #8 Burning (Beoning) and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku).   Seemingly lightyears removed from Hamaguchi’s earlier film, a probing five-hour marathon intensely exploring the disenchanted lives of a group of middle class women in 2017 Top Ten List #1 Happy Hour (Happî Awâ), this is instead a whimsical double romance conveyed with the innocence of a children’s story, with a piano score reminiscent of Miyazaki composer Joe Hisaishi, yet the accent is on first love, with intimations that something altogether different is consuming the soul, enraptured with the sight of someone altogether new.  Asako (Karata Erika), whose name is an anagram of the city of Osaka where she lives, has the appearance of a porcelain doll, overly polite, soft-spoken, but also a young beauty, where her fortunate circumstances seem to revolve around that essential fact, especially with this story playing out like a fairy tale.  Adapted from a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, the film explores these surface issues, examining the effect of looks in a relationship, as Asako falls in love with two men with identical looks, where the underlying attraction to the first seems to extend to the second, especially since the two men couldn’t be more different in other ways.  But all that is thrown out the window, as this is an infatuation romance, with the girl taken by the man’s strikingly good looks, falling head over heels in love, with little thought of the man’s point of view.  Essentially a first person narrative, told exclusively through the eyes of Asako, we follow her as she eyes an art exposition of Shigeo Gochō’s photography series, “Self and Others,” at the National Museum of Art in Osaka.  Gochō suffered from a rare degenerative disease which stunted his growth and caused his premature death, dramatically altering his perspective which is reflected in his work of staged portraits.  Something similar happens to one of the side characters, offering a unique window into the real meaning of love.  They key here is viewing a subject through a photographer’s lens, which essentially shows how someone looks, but only from the outside, as the viewer themselves must provide the internalization.  This film works in much the same way, as Asako is blown away by the casual nature of an onlooker in the museum who barely pauses to view the photographs, Baku (Masahiro Higashide), struck by his ruggedly handsome looks, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with shaggy hair, following him out the door and up the stairs where kids are setting off firecrackers.  The explosions cause each to turn around and look, seeing the other staring back at them, with Baku (camera on his feet as he moves towards Asako) taking her in his arms and offering that romantic screen kiss.  Fate has taken hold in the opening scene to the surging sounds of an electro-pop score by Tofubeats.  The film flips the script, as cinema typically expresses a male gaze eying female beauty, right out of the Éric Rohmer playbook, while this accentuates male body fascination through the female gaze.   

Capturing the euphoric rush of first love, given a mythical rendering, suggesting love has a mystical quality, this bubble is quickly burst by Asako’s best friend Haruyo (Sairi Itô) who calls him “bad news” and “a heartbreaker.”  True enough, we find them taking a motorcycle ride around the city, and while we don’t see what caused the accident, the motorcycle is totaled, apparently an act of recklessness, yet miraculously the two riders end up unscathed, seen smooching on the ground in each other’s arms as pedestrians gather to stare in utter amazement.  Their picturebook romance seems like one for the ages, though early on we discover Baku has a history of going out for a walk and not coming back for weeks, a quirky habit attributed to his curiosity, but also an accompanying indifference of others (the polar opposite of the photographer Shigeo Gochō), driving Asako into panic attacks, with Baku promising to change his ways.  Nonetheless, after about six months, he tells Asako he’s going out to buy shoes and never returns.  Skipping ahead a few years, Asako now lives in Tokyo working in a gourmet coffee shop around the corner from a corporate hi-rise building where we meet a rising junior executive in the sake industry, Ryôhei, played by the same actor Higashide (both characters curiously speaking different Japanese dialects), dressed in corporate attire, cleaning up after a business conference with his work partner and friend Kosuke (Kōji Seto).  Imagine her surprise when she comes in to collect the coffee pot, eying Ryôhei, who she immediately identifies as Baku, even touching his face, but then runs out in a hurry when she realizes her glaring mistake.  Ryôhei thinks he’s been mistaken for a tapir (baku), but amusingly finds no resemblance.  Nonetheless, she’s left a haunting impression on him.  Ryôhei is the polar opposite of her first boyfriend, well-groomed, a perfect gentleman, considerate of others, while following a traditional path to financial success.  The first encounter, however, scares Asako, believing it can’t be true, still shook by the reverberations of heartbreak from her first relationship.  What follows is like something from a Hong Sang-soo movie, literally mirroring the first part of the film, with another encounter of Gochō’s photographs (the same exposition on tour, now in Tokyo), and an eerily similar look across a crowded street, finally embracing each other, yet it’s all surfaces.  One of the more intriguing scenes involves Asako’s friend Maya (Rio Yamashita), an aspiring actress, watching a scene on television at a dinner gathering with Ryôhei and Kosuke, where Kosuke grows irritated at her performance, finding it all wrong, having studied a bit of Chekhov himself, but his scorching critique attacking the narcissism of the performance is refuted by Asako, who is genuinely moved, with each offering cogently honest viewpoints that seem to bring them all closer together as friends. 

With an emphasis on fate, Ryôhei attends one of Maya’s plays (hoping to run into Asako) when a real-life disaster occurs, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Wasurenai - Never Forget - Japan 3.11) and caused more than 10,000 deaths, the worst in Japanese history, which plays as a backdrop to the utter chaos it provides on the streets of Tokyo when buildings crumble and trains stop running.  On the long walk back home, through the panicked and crowded streets, Ryôhei and Asako eye one another (this time the camera follows Asako’s feet), running to embrace each other with another romanticized screen kiss.  This fusion of historical reality into a fairy tale romance certainly adds a unique complexity, including visits the two of them make to the coastal town of Sensei during the rebuilding efforts, which adds to the collective recovery of the nation, all playing into a motif of trauma survival.  With a thematic emphasis on empathy, developing a compassionate understanding of others, the film takes a seismic shift which only highlights how easy it is to lose one’s bearings.  Jumping forward five years, Ryôhei is transferred to Osaka, hoping they can buy a house there and be married, which is the moment Asako chooses to tell him about Baku, which doesn’t faze him (apparently knowing all along), adamant in his love, happy at the prospects of living a long and happy life together with their cat Jintan that becomes synonymous with their union.  With Haruyo returning to town, she, Maya and boyfriend Kosuke treat the happy couple to a celebratory dinner before their departure, which has an added surprise, as Baku (now an infamous fashion model, billboards seen all over town), arrives unexpectedly, whooshing Asako out of there in a rush, running away together without a word, an act of liberation or chaos?  Throughout the film Asako’s character has exhibited a kind of transparency and warmth, where the audience is able to see right through her, but not here, as the pain inflicted is disturbing, suggesting she hasn’t grown since her earlier relationship, despite hints of maturity.  Thinking only of herself aligns her with the selfie generation, bordering on narcissism, but is completely out of character with everything we know about her.  Beyond bewildering, this entire section suggests an induced dream, as if it never happened in real life, but things like this happen, associating an idealistic fascination with first love, handled in a distinct and uniquely female way.  Baku is a celebrity and a star, a cultural sensation where young girls grow ecstatic just thinking about him, a subject of idol worshipping.  Asako has fallen into this same delusional pit, retreating to girlish expectations, but he turns out to be much the same, indifferent to all the adulation.  It’s as if they hopped into a time machine and went back in time, only to discover the world has changed around them, with the earthquake’s shocking ramifications among them, so how could they pretend all that never happened?  It’s a curious development, concluding with a hint of ambiguity, as there’s no happily ever after scenario, yet also no real reconciliation.  These same lingering questions persist throughout the troubled lives of the four women struggling in 2017 Top Ten List #1 Happy Hour (Happî Awâ), with Hamaguchi becoming a modern era specialist in inner turmoil and trauma survival, calling into question what really constitutes happiness.  This film examines that illusion, providing a thread of realism that’s hard to turn away from, using the ocean as a mirror into the soul (with its unpredictable wild ragings and habitual rhythms), featuring exquisite cinematography by Yasuyuki Sasaki, but viewers will have to extract deeper insinuations on their own.