Japanese film-maker Kôji Fukada has created a film of great lucidity and calm, a walking-pace drama set in the quiet town of Nagi in the south of the country; this is a provincial place of seclusion and restraint, notable for its military base but also an interesting contemporary art gallery. The movie is less overtly sensational and emotional than Fukada’s previous pictures such as Love Life or Goodbye Summer, though it has the same Rohmeresque gentleness, the same considerate and caring mien, the same palate-cleansing wash of cool daylight. These are factors which do not however preclude intensity, even passion and a feeling that a dreamlife of yearning is taking place underneath innocuous waking reality.
At the centre of the film is an enigma: Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is a single woman who runs a dairy farm in Nagi, but her real passion is art. She draws and sculpts, but entirely for her own pleasure. None of her pieces get exhibited or sold. One warm spring day – the movie is elegantly interspersed with chapter-heading closeups in which different kinds of calendar get the days torn off – Yoriko is visited by her good friend Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect who after some time in Tokyo, moved to Taiwan to start a practice there with her husband Masato but returned to Japan after her divorce. What makes their friendship interesting is that they are sisters-in-law, or perhaps ex-sisters-in-law. Masato is Yoriko’s brother. So how exactly has their friendship survived and thrived for so long?
Yoriko happens also to be friendly with a local widower, Yoshikuro (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) with whose wife Yoriko was once in love. Yoshikuro’s teen son Hatsuko (Kawaguchi Waku) and his friend Keita (Kiyora Fujiwara) come around to Yoriko’s farm quite a bit and get a motherly welcome there; Hatsuko in fact recognises Yuri from a line drawing that Yoriko once made of her which his dad now has up in his bedroom. Could it be that the web of unrequited and unacknowledged love is revealing itself to be more complicated than we thought?
It could. Keita asks Yuri if she and Yoriko are a couple; this is an ingenuous inquiry which Yuri just about manages to laugh off, while perhaps trying to convey to him that this is not an appropriate question, and perhaps inadvertently conveying to us, the audience, that she has another reason for being uncomfortable. Keita is looking for ways of interpreting his own feelings for Hatsuko, feelings which become plain while he is looking at him through an camera obscura, a pinhole camera, which the boys had had to make during a class at the art gallery. This is the camera which reveals to the viewer an upside-down version of things, and his own feelings are topsy-turvy. He is in love.
On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance; we register the events almost as lines in an imagist poem. And the entirety of the action is a way of working through the enigma of Yuri and Yoriko, the ex-sisters-in-law. Of course, it is not an enigma – it is perhaps the most obvious thing in the film, yet there is tact and delicacy in the way the question is finally solved.