Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai)

 

Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Hamaguchi with Eiko Ishibashi

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Aku wa sonzai shinai)    B+                                                       Japan  (105 mi)  2023  d: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at the Venice Film Festival, where it also won a FIPRESCI Prize, and also Best Film at the London Festival, this is a peacefully contemplative film about the toxic human footprint left behind in the natural world, resulting in unintended consequences, becoming a parable about the balance of nature.  Shot in the mountainous region of Nagano, Japan, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics, this is that rare Japanese film where the distant mountains looming in the background overshadow the human presence, formed millions of years ago, as nature literally dwarfs the existence of mankind.  Hamaguchi has become one of more consistently fascinating and artistically daring new directors working today, where his films are absolutely precise, and are the reason we go to the theaters, starting out making a trilogy of low-budget documentaries on the lives of those who were affected by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster which caused more than 10,000 deaths, the worst in Japanese history, where the collective consciousness of the nation was literally left numb from the trauma.  He then expanded into some of the more innovative arthouse features of the last decade, 2017 Top Ten List #1 Happy Hour (Happî Awâ) (2015), a sprawling yet intimate five-hour film about four women in their mid-30’s whose lives are upended by a series of personal struggles, Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo) (2018), an eerie yet touching love story, 2021 #10 Film of the Year Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Gûzen to sôzô), an anthology of three short films dealing broadly with themes of love and loss, and finally his most acclaimed work, winning the Academy Award for Best International Film, 2022 Top Ten List #1 Drive My Car (Oraibu mai kâ), an elegiac film about love and mourning.  Working again with musical composer Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Hamaguchi’s last film, this couldn’t be more radically different, as it was originally conceived as a live orchestration, with Ishibashi asking the director to provide silent video footage to play during her performance, weaving together a mosaic-like integration of sound and image, where it was first intended to be a 30-minute short, but expanded into the hour-long film GIFT (2024).  Having lived entirely in urban environments, Hamaguchi visited Ishibashi at her studio in the countryside and was struck by the sweeping landscapes and how nature flows through the community, becoming the inspiration behind the film, shot near the area where she lives, with Hamaguchi adding dialogue and turning this into a highly concentrated film that thinks and encourages reflection.  Having been taught by filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa in graduate school, Hamaguchi was struck by how his films, especially in the 90’s when he was most prolific, had very unclear endings or were left unresolved, yet left a deep impact on viewers.  In a choice follow-up to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), Hamaguchi revisits the Japanese concept of Komorebi, the shadowplay of sunlight through the leaves, opening and closing the film with long, wordless tracking shots of the camera gazing up into the wintry canopy of trees high above in a style resembling the spatial, three-dimensional aesthetic of a 3D camera, where it feels like the camera is literally floating in air.  Visually this feels like an overt reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932) where the protagonist is awake to witness his own burial, cognizant of all he sees, with the camera providing his viewpoint looking up while lying inside his coffin, placed on a horse-drawn cart on the ride to the cemetery, seeing the leaves of trees overhead.  That film was also shot as a silent film, but utilizes basic elements of sound.  The film reflects the Chinese principle of Yin and Yang that presupposes an existential perfection carried exactly by two poles, light and dark, where one cannot exist without the other.  Shot by Yoshio Kitagawa, accompanied by the calm yet richly textured music by Ishibashi that slowly grows more dissonant, Hamaguchi creates a meditative montage that is fully immersed in the surrounding natural world, where the simple everyday life is not easy, having to work hard for basic necessities, finding poetry on a small scale, trying to get the maximum out of slowly accumulating atmosphere, with long settings, crisp pictures, and above all, silence. 

Set in Harasawa, a fictional village in the idyllic quiet of the woods with a few thousand inhabitants, it resembles an Eden-like existence or eco-paradise, where the slow-moving film exudes a meditative calm, allowing viewers to identify with an established rhythm of life, yet the title alone exudes a sense of dread and foreboding, suggesting something terrible is about to happen.  The tranquility of the remote region is quickly established in the slow, near wordless immersion of outdoor scenes, as 8-year-old Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) is seen cheerfully playing alone in the snow while her more industrious father, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika, an assistant director from an earlier film, also a driver on the set), is noisily working with a chainsaw to cut large chunks of firewood, which he then chops into smaller pieces with an axe, collecting them into a wheelbarrow before stacking them in a woodpile next to an alpine chalet.  Smoke can be seen coming out of the chimney from a wood-burning stove keeping the interior warm.  The first spoken words come more than ten minutes into the film as Takumi, a taciturn handyman in the village, is seen gathering fresh spring water, placing them into large containers, where he and his friend Kazuo (Hiroyuki Miura) haul them up to his truck for use in an udon noodle shop, claiming the soba noodles taste so much better when boiled in spring water.  But he’s struck by the discovery of a patch of wild wasabi growing alongside the path, where the pungent taste is a welcome addition to evening meals.  This secluded routine of harmony and peace is upended by the announcement that Playmode, a Tokyo corporation, has recently purchased centrally located real estate with the intention of turning the grounds into high-end glamping campsites, luring rich city folk to seek refuge of a pristine natural environment that may end up upsetting the natural ecological balance of the region.  Guided by an impromptu town hall presentation from Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), improbable spokespersons who are actually hired from a talent agency, the locals immediately spot problems in their proposal, rushing the plans of construction with a use it or lose it push to beat expiring Covid-relief subsidies, poking holes in their promise to deliver economic benefits, only to be met with some shameful corporate stonewalling, offering little more than empty platitudes as all their worst fears are confirmed.  In a collision of two entirely different worlds, Playmode has no idea about the fragile ecosystem that currently exists, discovering the plot of land they’ve chosen is on a deer trail, yet they intend to forge ahead anyway and bulldoze the land for their project, introducing septic tank sewage systems that will contaminate the freshwater springs, which they’re not concerned about, thinking the damage will be minimal.  Residents implore them to understand how damage introduced upstream makes its way to residents downstream, and may be irreversible.  While there are a variety of points of view in this culture clash, including the risk of fires and disturbing the migration patterns of wildlife, most are expressed in a calm, rational manner, with the residents offering intelligent reasons why they have chosen to live there, as it offers benefits that don’t exist in the big cities.  They don’t want to see that lost in a capitalist zeal for quick profits, sweeping aside local input while prioritizing what’s convenient for urban people, as the pollutant damage could affect generations long afterwards.  In an exaggerated sense, these are good versus evil arguments, where Japan, perhaps more than any other nation, has been cognizant of ecological impact, as they’re the only country on earth to have survived the deadly radiation effects of a nuclear blast, and the catastrophic effects were horrific.  Seeing the modern world encroaching on the natural is a theme many fans of Miyazaki and Ghibli Studio will recognize.  What’s cleverly revealed is the new corporate face of evil hides behind a subterfuge of lies and deceit, making promises they can’t keep, hiding behind an illusion of community spirit and good faith, pretending the feedback elicited will actually change their plans in the future, yet all that really matters is good old-fashioned greed.     

Politeness is an ingrained cultural aspect of Japanese society, yet this is an angry film, one that suggests the future is bleak, where the placid surface hides the boiling resentment bubbling below, like a volcanic force to be reckoned with that no one ever sees, but can erupt at any moment.  Traditional filmmaking does not look like this, where Hamaguchi refuses to repeat himself and is constantly challenged to seek new directions.  While the driving force behind the film is actually the ambient score by Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi seamlessly recontextualizes the music and GIFT into a final version of what is clearly an art film, which is not for everyone, and should not be evaluated like any other movie, as it’s difficult to grasp how tireless yet aesthetically demanding the director is in presenting the story.  Without political moralizing, the film is not a didactic plea for environmental protection like Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013), but is instead a supposition, an interpretation, suggesting nothing in nature is evil, while shades of good and evil exist in the humanity of mankind, with the film setting a philosophical-ethical equation, delving into questions of morality and guilt, and how innocence can also become guilty without the dark force of evil intruding.  With precise shots, Hamaguchi creates a quiet, slightly threatening mood, creating an abrupt yet beguiling ending that is completely unexpected, and not altogether comprehensible, where certainly part of the allure is you don’t really need to understand to appreciate the beauty of it, where the last 5-minutes are simply mesmerizing.  Even the director has acknowledged that he still wasn’t sure what the film meant to him.  This is a challenge of a different order where viewers need to realize just how unlike this is from other films, a metaphorical exercise where the enigmatic finale has confounded audiences and left them mystified, as the bizarre events seen happening onscreen are simultaneously blended with a recollection of what happened previously, all taking place in the imagination, so you not only wonder what it all means, but you also wonder what the hell just happened, as it’s specifically designed so you can’t really tell what’s going on.  Shot in a fog-like mist, growing mythical to the core, sinister gunshots can be heard echoing from the forest, suggesting hunters are nearby, yet this turns into a dreamlike landscape that is utterly perplexing, a strange twist of fate that may actually play out exclusively on a subconscious level, perhaps entering the psychological mindset of a wounded animal in the woods, like the animal dream sequences of Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl) (2021), where the meaning is more metaphorically suggestive than real.  But it has that kind of primal instinct fury, born out of desperation and arising out of grim circumstances, as death lingers like a shroud of darkness, completely altering the landscape.  It feels like a cautionary tale, something along the lines of There but for the grace of God go I, as morality and good intentions are thrown out the window if they come too late, leading to apocalyptic implications, where those that abuse the earth may face the wrath of nature, which may not sit silently.  What’s truly curious is how the realist, straightforward style suddenly morphs into a surrealist day of reckoning that we must face if we open that Pandora’s Box.  Takumi serves as the medium, as he exists in human form, but also deeply communes with nature, where he embodies that spiritual connection, at one with the trees, the wind, the water, and the animals, where they are inseparable.  Yet Takumi regularly forgets to pick up his daughter from school, so she exerts her self-reliant independence and typically chooses to walk home through the woods alone, which can be a precarious adventure veering into a Grimm Brother’s fairy tale, as the forest can be fraught with danger, despite all the beauty, where we seem to be transported into the wilderness of a parallel universe.  The lush, hypnotic score that accompanies the darkly haunting finale provides a key, featuring an anxious turn into something more meditative and somber, offering a disconsolate mood with no relief, where we feel the weight of frustration inside an enveloping bleakness, as we return once again to another Komorebi sequence in the trees, this time against a darker sky.  The existential ambiguity we’re left with does not happen often in films, yet must be praised when handled with such a deft hand, as we’re left with no answers, just a sublime journey into the melancholic abyss.     

2022 Top Ten List #1 Drive My Car (Oraibu mai kâ)

 

 

 

Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Hamaguchi winning Best Screenplay at Cannes

 

Hamaguchi on the set with Tōko Miura

 

Hiroshima August 1945

2 month's later

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRIVE MY CAR (Oraibu mai kâ)                A                                                                         Japan  (179 mi)  2021  d: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself squarely and deeply.                                                                                                                                    

 —Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) from Drive My Car, opening chapter of short story collection Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami, 2014

Best known for the extraordinary 6-hour 2017 Top Ten List #1 Happy Hour (Happî Awâ), a unique exploration into the lives of four disenchanted middle-aged women as they re-evaluate their lives, followed by Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo) (2018), a whimsical double romance, while Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has released two films simultaneously this year, 2021 #10 Film of the Year Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Gûzen to sôzô), a set of three contemporary love stories, and this exquisitely staged, quietly transformative journey that is a brilliant adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2014 short story collection Men Without Women, including the entitled story, drawing inspiration from two others as well, Scheherazade and Kino.  Murakami is much more prominent in Asia than the West, especially in Japan, where no one else compares to him, known as the “voice of a generation,” where some may recall Lee Chang-dong’s recent film adaptation 2018 Top Ten List #8 Burning (Beoning), often emphasizing the minute details of ordinary life, forcing you to read between the lines to appreciate his artistry.  Co-written by Takamasa Oe, who also assistant directed, this is simply superb storytelling at its finest, extremely conscientious, highly original, dramatically complex, and overwhelmingly powerful, where the fictional work is far less powerful than the film, developing new characters and new circumstances, with Hamaguchi also incorporating theatrical dialogue from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, crafting a literary mosaic that won the Best Screenplay award when it premiered at Cannes, while also nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Foreign Feature.  While it has won a slew of awards and plenty of critical praise, listed at or near the top of many best of the year lists, including #1 by Manohla Dargis at The New York Times, Best Movies of 2021 - The New York Times, the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, Awards - New York Film Critics Circle - NYFCC, and the LA Critics Association, Awards for 2021 - LAFCA, listed at #2 at Film Comment announces 2021 best-of-year lists, indieWIRE’s Best Films of 2021, and The Ten Best Films of 2021 | Features | Roger Ebert, #3 at The 50 best films of 2021 | Sight and Sound - BFI and Cinema Scope: Top Ten Films of 2021 - Year-End Lists, what’s truly remarkable is how most people will probably never see a staged Chekhov performance in their lifetime, yet this director is mainstreaming Chekhov’s controversial and challenging themes to a movie audience, which is a provocative undertaking.  One should say at the outset that not everyone will get this film, with many finding the hype underserved, believing it’s largely an excessively overlong film about nothing.  Also for some people, poetry does nothing for them.  That’s unfortunate, as those with a willingness to look underneath the surface will find a treasuretrove of hidden poetry re-iterating themes Hamaguchi has been exploring in all his films.  At three-hours in length, this is a largely introspective film with an understated, elegiac tone, with themes of forgiveness and loss that require a patient audience willing to undertake a journey into the unknown, as the destination is never clear, becoming an existential exploration of death, grief, heartbreak, and trauma, yet explored in a manner that may remind some of Jacques Rivette, another literary director, as both use theatrical performances to unearth the heart of the story, using the overly detached rhythm and syntax of Chekhov dialogue and rehearsals to ask perplexing questions of the characters, forced to face themselves in a mirror, where honesty is a required prerequisite at each stage along the way.  Much like Kafka uses an anonymous everyman character known only as “K,” where all the action is filtered through his eyes, Hamaguchi uses Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and theater director who is married to an actress-turned-TV screenwriter Oto (which means sound), Reika Kirishima, who previously appeared in Norwegian Wood (2010), an extremely introspective adaptation of a 1987 Haruki Murakami novel.  Oto has an unusual writing style, activated only by having sex, as she narrates a story to her husband with meticulous detail that she later forgets, yet the climax of the story often corresponds to her own sexual climax, requiring him to recall the exact details afterwards.  Both harbor secrets, as Oto has a string of affairs during their 20-year marriage that she never mentions, while Kafuku uncovers his wife’s infidelity, but never confronts her about it.  After watching her husband in a performance of Waiting for Godot, featuring the absurdist contradiction, “You must go on.  I can’t go on.  I’ll go on,” Oto introduces him to a young actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a frequent collaborator on the television drama she was working on.  Arriving home early one afternoon after his flight is cancelled, Kafuku sees his wife having sex with Takatsuki, turning around and leaving before being detected, but never brings it up with her afterwards.  Yet one day, before leaving for work, Oto indicates she has something to say when he returns home later in the evening, but when he arrives, she is lying on the floor, dead from a brain hemorrhage.  Following her funeral, overwhelmed by grief, he breaks down in the middle of his performance in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and is unable to continue, as the lines from Chekhov’s play parallel his own to an uncomfortable degree.  At this point, around the 40-minute mark, the title appears onscreen and the credits roll.  “The pandemic does play a big factor in all of this,” Hamaguchi says.  “This idea of losing someone that you love and yet needing to carry on.”

Fast forward to Hiroshima two years later, Kafuku accepts an artist’s residency to produce a multilingual adaptation of Uncle Vanya, housed at a remote location directly on the sea an hour away, distinctly chosen so he may listen to his wife’s reading of the play, leaving silences where he may insert his own role, on a cassette tape along the route as he drives his bright red 1987 Saab 900 Turbo, Drive My Car : The Saab 900 Turbo as sanctuary - Hagerty.  But the theater company won’t allow him to drive, a result of an unfortunate accident that occurred years earlier, so they hire a young female chauffeur to transport him, the extremely reserved Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura, whose understated performance is a wonder), who is the picture of passivity, yet turns out to be unusually competent, continuing his habit of fixating on his wife reading the lines of the play as she drives, which serves as a way of still connecting to his wife, revealing just how difficult it is to let go.  Despite dying early, the character of Oto is central to the narrative, as her voice and ghostly presence are essential to the storyline.  This back and forth mirroring effect can be emotionally gripping, recalling Olivier Assayas’s 2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), with Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) practicing the lines of the play she’s going to perform with the help of her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), yet she is actually describing her own predicament.  Consumed by loneliness and alienation, so much of the film is about the inability to communicate, where the central conflict that Kafuku feels guilty about is that he failed to talk about his wife’s infidelity before she passed away, never getting a chance to process the built-up anger he experienced, which he stifled in favor of trying to maintain the status quo of their relationship.  Most likely that was the subject she wanted to discuss on the day that she died, but Kafuku was reticent to return home, so he drove around aimlessly, afraid their dynamic might be unalterably changed forever, still blaming himself for her death, thinking she may have been saved if he came home earlier, remaining tortured by his love.  The auditions are fascinating, as they offer a multilingual array of voices, from Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Taiwanese Mandarin, where some of the best scenes are built around the actors struggling to figure out how to convey their character, with a screen over the stage translating the dialogue into various languages.  An early audition between the Japanese-speaking Takatsuki (whose career has been derailed by a sex scandal) and his Taiwanese co-star Janice Chang (Sonia Yuan) shows intensity that blurs the lines between performance and reality, in spite of the fact that neither can remotely understand what the other is saying, yet they have to learn trust, working off the rhythm of the dialogue in order for the play to succeed.  Easily the one that stands out is Yoon-a (Park Yu-rim), offering an emotionally impactive scene while performing in sign language, which only accentuates the dramatic possibilities of the moment, unlocking suprising depth that wasn’t there before.  This is the first scene where Vanya in another language truly enhances the underlying meaning, as it’s strikingly intense, leaving viewers a bit in awe of the moment.  A former dancer who is deaf but can hear, so she can understand words perfectly, but only in Korean, translated by Yoon-su (Jin Dae-yeon), one of the theater organizers who is fluent in multiple languages, including sign language, which is rather remarkable, something that takes Kafuku by surprise.  All those that auditioned got parts, not necessarily the ones they auditioned for, while Takatsuki is given the part of Vanya, clearly a part he’s unsuited for, but cast nonetheless, as all thought the part was reserved for the director himself, so no one auditioned for it.  Plenty of parallels exist between Chekov’s play and the actors themselves, as once they know the text so thoroughly they understand the innate rhythm of the language, exactly what Kafuku listens for on the tape, so their physical responses will come from within, happening naturally, hoping to remove all artifice.  These rehearsals become a focal point to show how acting can be used to find emotional truths within other people, where this same facet is true of Kafuku as he attempts to extricate his current life from the grips of his past connection to his wife, which still has a hold on him.  At one point they decide to move their rehearsals outside in a park-like setting, choosing a spot where Watari was reading a book, allowing her to watch for a change, getting a firsthand look at what Kafuku does for a living.  It offers an incredible moment, as Sonia’s closing monologue (Uncle Vanya: Sonya's Monologue) is delivered in silence through Korean sign language, delivered to Janice as a stand-in for Vanya, speaking Mandarin Chinese, yet it reaches a kind of inner calm, a profound moment of reverence, as she lovingly drapes her arms over Vanya’s shoulders while standing behind her, providing what amounts to a spiritual restoration.  Using a minimal score by Eiko Ishibashi, often intruding during the lengthy drive sequences, it seems that Hamaguchi has a different cinematographer for each picture, yet his locations and camerawork by Hidetoshi Shinomiya are remarkably astute, where it was no accident that the setting is in Hiroshima.  Breaking early one day, Kafuku asks if Watari will simply drive around town, perhaps hoping to open up their relationship, with Watari mentioning her experiences with an abusive mother, but stops short of revealing more, surprisingly taking him to an immense incineration plant, with a short walkway to the nearby sea.  It’s a meditative moment that adds onto the existing theme of trauma, as it’s certainly questionable whether Japan has ever really recovered from the massive destruction and radiation from a nuclear bomb, where photos and news report coverage were immediately withheld from the Japanese public in the immediate aftermath, as US occupation authorities maintained a monopoly on scientific and medical information about the effects of the atomic bomb, the only country to have ever experienced that, with scars of grotesque physical disfigurement and colossal social trauma, where an entire field of burn medicine had to immediately adapt to the extraordinary circumstances, remaining highly sensitive to potential nuclear disasters, especially following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that is still leaking radiation a decade later.  Perhaps lesser known to viewers, Hamaguchi made a trilogy of earlier documentaries with Kō Sakai on individual lives who were affected by the Fukushima disaster, THE SOUND OF WAVES (2012), VOICES FROM THE WAVES: SHINCHIMACHI (2013), and VOICES FROM THE WAVES: KESENNUMA (2013). 

There are underlying tensions with the director and his leading actor, perhaps hoping to extract revenge, as they are connected by shared intimate experiences with Oto, fertile grounds for exploration.  This culminates with one of the better sequences in the film, taking place in the back seat of the car.  After a few unproductive discussions, Kafuku mentions the obvious, that his wife was having affairs during their marriage, that she used sex as a catalyst for a stream of thought that ultimately became her stories, and that Takatsuki was in some way connected to this aspect of Oto’s life, though she died before this was ever discussed, which, perhaps for the first time, gave Takatsuki insight into the extent of his director’s grief and sorrow at the lack of resolution from his marriage.  The loneliness inherent in living through the grief is painfully evident, so Takatsuki begins telling a story, but its one Kafuku already heard in the film’s opening scene, knowing it’s a story with no ending, something that still causes him considerable discomfort.  However, Oto told Takatsuki more of the story, something that leaves Kafuku completely transfixed as the look in his eyes are remarkable as he insatiably listens to what he’s never heard before.  It becomes apparent that the story was subtextually about Kafuku, that Oto was aware of her transgressions and how it was affecting her husband, with Takatsuki implying she meant to tell him.  He offers this information as a means of solace and consolation, told with a calm demeanor, seeing the fear and sadness in his director’s eyes.  It may be the only selfless act Takatsuki commits during the entire film, as he typically acts on compulsion, yet it’s an extraordinary moment of two men quietly communing over the woman they each loved, perhaps struggling to attain a moment of peace in her departure.  This sequence has a dreamlike effect, helping Kafuku through this stage of grief, with the camera finding each of their faces.  But there’s more, as Kafuku opens up briefly about how he and Oto lost a 4-year old daughter to pneumonia, but if she were alive today, she would be exactly Watari’s age, with the camera finding her face in the car mirror, finally understanding their connection.  The focus of the film completely shifts after that sequence, as Takatsuki exits, with Kafuku pulling out two cigarettes, encouraging Watari to smoke alongside him, something he would never have allowed previously, as he was fastidious about the immaculate care of his car.  While it’s clear he’s emotionally drained, no longer caring about the production, or anything else, and doesn’t really want to talk, Watari tells him she grew up in a community of liars, where it was lifesaving to be able to determine who was telling the truth, sharing her view that Takatsuki was being entirely truthful.  The film shifts dramatically to the quietly mysterious Watari, whose authenticity is stunning, as they make the long pilgrimage to her home town of Kami-junitika village in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, which is completely covered in snow by the time they get there, taking a long and arduous journey that is utterly transforming, with Kafuku offering to share driving time, but she insists she is a professional driver and can drive an entire day without sleep, claiming she can sleep on the long ferry ride (about 18-hours each way).  With both sharing hidden secrets, we learn Watari’s story is considerably more harrowing and appalling than his, yet she tells it in a straightforward manner, without an ounce of theatricality, simply an expression from her heart, revealing startling revelations about her life that are overwhelmingly traumatizing, combined with grief and regrets on his own personal loss, leading to moments that are surprisingly personal and reflective, yet most of the journey is spent in silence, as they come to realize they’re not alone in harboring dark feelings of regret towards the past.  Clearly a newfound respect has developed, and with it a shared bond with viewers, who are taking a remarkable ride without having a clue about the final destination, yet the director offers meticulous visual cues along the way, offering some idea of the length of the journey, as the film has simply taken a notable turn, with all eyes on Watari, whose surprising sense of composure comes at a price, as she basically lost her childhood transporting her mother around, only to be physically abused if she woke her mother up, so she developed painstakingly precise driving habits that are near supernatural in nature.  By the time they arrive to what was once her home, destroyed in a mudslide, with the faint outline of the home still visible under the snowfall, we experience an almost sacred silence as the two embrace and console each other in a tender and excruciatingly personal moment.  The film needs every minute of its extensive length, as the poetic mastery of these remarkable sequences requires a lengthy build-up, intermixing dialogue from Uncle Vanya to accentuate the existential themes with extraordinary intimacy, ultimately becoming a story of grief and healing, using driving as a brilliantly concise metaphor for how storytelling, acting, and the power of love all draw us towards unknown destinations that are certain to change our lives, with art, as a form of catharsis, having a healing capacity to guide us where we need to go.  This is a revelatory film that demonstrates empathy, in the truest sense of the word, where living with trauma simply can’t be described in words, but must be experienced, as each step, each day is a harsh reminder of what must be overcome, and only by living each day can one transcend these painful realities.  While the rest of the world can look away, this is the essence of what the Japanese had to live through since Hiroshima, where one can get consumed by thoughts of the dead, feeling more like a universal peace offering.    

Note

Barack Obama is the only American president to visit Hiroshima since the atomic bombing in 1945.