I missed the first Naomi Kawase film I was planning to go see. Suzaku (1997) has been categorized as a coming of age, a family drama, a romance and tragedy. Condemning as it is nostalgic, concerned with tradition, and still outside convention, the writer/director’s first feature established a portrait of rural Japan: at the same time disappearing and impossible to ignore.
Even so, I slept through it. I had stayed up all night and driven to the beach at six a.m. to go swimming. Around daybreak all the gas stations were closed, filling up the tanks from large trucks with larger tanks. I didn’t get home until sometime in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day lying supine in various parts of my apartment until the rooms became dim and I closed my eyes.
It’s the summertime. A subject Kawase seems fascinated by. By the languor and the long stretches of space. Fields of grass, fields of light. I saw the sun rise nearly every day of her retrospective at the MoMA. I walked across the bridge. I fell asleep sitting up.
A few days later, I made it to an afternoon screening of The Weald (1997), a documentary focusing on a number of elderly people living in forest regions of the Yoshino Mountains and the village of Nishi-Yoshino. Mostly working in agriculture and craft, Kawase’s subjects are framed by their responses to posed questions. Predominantly we do not hear the questions. Sometimes we hear Kawase’s laughter, encouraging these remote stars to engage with her prying, her project. More than one insists she move the camera away from his face.
The Weald’s interviews are cut with a number of wistful, almost amateurish 8mm shots of the Japanese countryside. The national relationship with nostalgia and tradition are set up here as some of Kawase’s chief concerns. One man sings, “I prefer the flower that has withered far more than the bud or the flower in bloom.” This becomes a reprise in the film, and discussion quickly, invariably turns to mortality. Reincarnation, the desire to reclaim youth. And a great tension re the notion of happiness. Many of the film’s 73 minutes are spent lingering on the term. If there’s any truth or honesty in having felt it, or how.
In one scene, four people dance, both joyfully and mechanically, careful not to mistake a step, and revelling in the gesture, to classical folk music. A person in the theater was snoring.
Still the Water. 2014. Japan. Directed by Naomi Kawase
Later that day, I went to see Hotaru (2000), a romance between a stripper and a potter in a small suburban city in Japan. I took someone along with me to see this, and she fell asleep. The film is an achievement in the banality of love. Of simple miscommunications and necessities of intimacy. Of how desire and affection are separated, and how people choose to define themselves by career and history and body. The female protagonist is balanced by the shame society imposes, and internal, albeit passive, pride.
A woman who has been dancing into middle age says that when she dies, she hopes to be reincarnated as a dancer. When she gets out of jail (all the strippers go to jail at one point, for stripping), she does a tease, taking off her shirt and bra, in a public fountain to the guitar music of young, male street performers.
Men in the film, even the potter, are treated ultimately as counterpart, a force of conservatism, alienation. The stripper destroys her boyfriend’s grandfather’s kiln with a pickaxe. The structure appears throughout the film, its role is ancient, steeped in tradition. He watches for a while, then he joins her.
Sometime after this, I missed a second Suzaku screening. I was watching the curtains billow in a dark room in the day. It would get hotter as the week went on, and on following days I made it to see three films: White Moon (1993), Lies (2015) and Respect (2016).
White Moon is something between a short and a feature, the most directly endowed to nostalgia, and still manages to subvert cliché. It opens with a song, removed from the rest of the story, a stylized wink, about summertime.
There is very little dialogue in Kawase’s depiction of two awkward, almost saccharinely innocent, twenty-somethings falling in love. About a third of the film’s 55 minutes is devoted to the young man’s daily commute. These long, quiet scenes of biking, empty countryside, changing clothes, and standing, as a security guard, outside of an anonymous municipal building, work to detach the viewer from love’s tropes of blissful levity.
Instead of impasse or conflict or torment coming between the two, their love is curtailed by random violence, a mysterious child with a gun, who kills the man at his post and flees. White Moon mocks the convention of its own love story from within its bounds, and ends in a series of overexposed, washed out shots of immaculate, essentially virginal, landscape.
You can sense the fluxes of sentimentality toward Japan in these moments. What makes the environment beautiful is also what makes it untrue: its ability to maintain both the facade and dying secret behind it. The Nineties were a time of economic, technological and cultural apogee for the country, and yet Kawase was overwhelmingly concerned with preserving this archaic narrative, despite its lie.
Suzaku. 1997. Japan. Directed by Naomi Kawase. Image courtesy of Kumie Inc.
Kotaro Shibata and Yasuyo Kamimura featured in image.
In her more recent efforts in short film, the director leaves behind the almost home movie feel of her early work, and takes on the unsaid obscurities of language. Lies sets up a high definition, fictional interview with a male womenswear designer, who speaks for women’s perspective and desires. His answers, vague and provocative, work to manipulate, insert masculine influence in every realm, upsetting both the female interviewer and her translator, with whom he is revealed to be involved in an ongoing affair. It is another representation of the triteness of romance, and it is, though a little excessive, a contemporary puzzle of a film.
Respect, on the other hand, almost plays like PSA about how to communicate despite our differences. A blind person, a deaf person and a mute person star in this obvious, and somewhat stupid, four-minute morality flex, by far Kawase’s least inspired, and least transgressive attempt that I saw.
I finally was able to watch Suzaku on the TV in my living room. The shades were drawn, and I was sweating. The film is a visual triumph; it’s slow, but still finds a way to make lingering feel urgent, for which Kawase became the youngest recipient of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Shot in the mountainous Nara Prefecture region, it focuses on the margins of society, the process of being forgotten, and, more than any other work I saw, loss of faith, at loss in tradition.
Michiru, a small child, grows into a teenager. She confronts the responsibilities of her family, romance and her relationship with an increasingly isolated life. As Japan evolved into modernity, so many were left behind by the customs (agriculture, education, hospitality) that bound and sustained the country for centuries. Only one actor was a professional at the time of filming; many were locals of the region.
There are two jarring breaks in the narrative, in which we lapse from 35mm to 8mm footage of the community. These moments are delicate, yet unsettling. Defiant and transgressive in their ungrounding chronology. Accompanied by piano music, the portraits of rural austerity, and the people who endure it, become as disquieting as they are beautiful.
The first instance appears after Michiru’s father implicitly commits suicide, and the second is revealed to be from his camera, his own documentation of the crumbling and rapturous world he can no longer withstand. Here, Kawase and her characters merge. Their suffering becomes her own, a shared longing, and confusion, and tenderness, and distress. A conversation between the obsolescence and simplicity of the past, and the ineffabile distillation of the future.
Hotaru (Firefly). 2000. Japan. Directed by Naomi Kawase. Image courtesy of Kumie Inc.
Toshiya Nagasawa and Yuko Nakamura featured in image.
Kawase’s films are quiet, and they are confined. One is not pulled from the screen to civilization at large. Still, in the cool, mostly empty theaters of the MoMA, and on my couch, listening to the rain on the aluminum siding, one already knows the fate of the world with which she grappled. Against the traditions lost, the humanity behind them remains, unconfined. It is lush, epidemic as the trees on the mountains she so frequently returned to, and universal as the folk music and uncomfortable close-ups her films employ.
In the final scene of Suzaku, Michiru’s grandmother speaks the words of a song to herself, falls asleep.
