Sunday 14 October 2018

London Film Festival 2018 | Asako I & II; Monrovia, Indiana

LFF 2018 | #2 

Foundations. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II opens with an exaggerated love-at-first-sight encounter across a pile of firecrackers and spirals further into falsehoods from there. A romance between Asako, an outwardly quiet student, and Baku, a handsome slacker in sandals, blossoms quickly before Baku disappears without warning, leaving her broken-hearted. Years pass, and Asako meets Ryohei, a salaryman in Tokyo and the physical doppelganger of Baku, though the two men’s personalities are nothing alike. At first Asako resists the reignition, or confirmation, of her attraction, but, following a major earthquake that tests the infrastructure of Tokyo, the two reunite in a city that holds firm and they start to build a life there. Is Ryohei a perfection of Baku, in that he looks the same but remains a constant and reliable presence in her life, or is he a reduction, a mannequin with the same face but none of the vibrancy and mystery that drew her to him in the first place? Hamaguchi cultivates this unplaceable indecisiveness by framing Asako as a blank slate. She’s constantly in thought but rarely expressive, and Hamaguchi ensures that it’s easy to misjudge or misinterpret where her heart truly lies. Her mind is always elsewhere. She’s never quite passive but never active, either. She doesn’t drive, and relies on Ryohei to drive her to places outside of the city, and she always seems to blend into the background. During dinner parties, she stands behind the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen in her apartment as her friends and lover sit and talk at a table in front of it; she’s never out of the conversation, but she never feels like a part of it. She’s perpetually torn, between love and loneliness, the past and the present, Baku and Ryohei, certainty and mystery — and that’s no way to live. But maybe, after all, we’re doomed to never escape the ghosts of our pasts, especially if we decide that we can’t see them.

It’s impossible to ignore the ghosts that haunt Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, a portrait of small rural town in the American midwest with its history firmly in the past. Kids are taught about the town’s most successful citizen, a high-school basketball star from the 1920s whose name still ordains the school gymnasium; a man is awarded a fifty year service certificate by his masonic lodge in a stumbling ceremony conducted by similarly elderly men; a priest delivers an impassioned funeral service for a lifelong resident of the town; population growth is discussed and debated by the town council. Wiseman takes these brief fragments of his time in Monrovia and stitches them together to create an impression of the town as it exists to him, in this moment. And what he witnesses here is the gradual dismantling of a way of life that doesn’t fit into the idea of what the modern world should be. In perhaps the most telling scene, farmers gather in a cavernous, mostly empty barn for an auction. The auctioneer frenetically calls bids on a combine harvester with a starting price of $100,000 as the farmers in the room silently watch on. Farming is debilitatingly expensive, yet it’s the foundation of Monrovia’s floundering economy. Meanwhile, a property development company representative aggressively pitches a new housing project to the council as a means to boost the town’s population, while one resident’s complaints that the fire hydrant near his home is not fit for purpose fall on deaf ears. There can be no progress without the means to handle it but the council go after it anyway, thoughtlessly sold on the financial benefits more people will bring. Wiseman’s patient editing allows the cumulation of these images to develop into something truly apocalyptic. All the old heroes are dead. There’s no life in Monrovia anymore, but the future looks even bleaker; Wiseman’s camera lingers in a graveyard. Soon, there will be no roots left in this town, only the ghosts of lives that nobody can remember.