In the almost full year that we’ve all been stuck inside, I’ve struggled to muster much enthusiasm for the online festival experience. I’d rather have something than nothing, of course, and I’m incredibly glad that institutions have found ways to survive and adapt, but the excitement I have for festivals (the exploration of new places, the running between screenings, the time spent talking about cinema with strangers) is largely absent when I have to experience them on my laptop. I already have unwatched DVDs piling up at home, a full hard-drive that I need to work through, and a bunch of stuff about to expire on MUBI that I’ve not gotten around to yet. An online festival is another thing to add to the list. It’s just more movies.
All that being said, there’s something about a region-specific festival that grabs my attention. The narrow remit of such things allow space for deep and adventurous programming, and festivals dedicated to one thing tend to have the ability to shine a spotlight on work that may not have the marketing power to stand out among 200+ films in an international line-up. Case in point: the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, an annual selection of (mostly) contemporary Japanese films that have been curated and screened in several cities across the UK since 2004. The festival has previously presented works by filmmakers like Naoko Ogigami, Junji Sakamoto, and Nobuhiro Yamashita, among many others, that remain undistributed and largely unknown in the UK, and this year, necessitated by the pandemic, the programme was viewable online in its entirety for the first time, with all eighteen films available to stream for free. The opportunity to enjoy a vertical slice of Japanese film culture from home in this way is unprecedented, and a testament to the value of region-specific festivals and their ability to lay the groundwork for filmmakers to build an international audience for their work.
I would most likely never have discovered the work of Yukiko Mishima if it wasn’t for the programming of this festival. Since 2009, Mishima has made eight feature films, along with some TV work, and two of them have been shown in previous incarnations of this festival: A Stitch of Life in 2017, and Dear Etranger in 2019. Her latest film, Shape of Red, is precisely the kind of discovery that these festivals are designed to facilitate. The film opens with a blizzard, as a man and a woman silently drive through snowbound roads listening to Jeff Buckley on the radio. Toko is stuck in a marriage of servitude to Shin, an old-fashioned salaryman who wants her to stay at home. They live together in a cavernous, stuffy house in the suburbs of Tokyo with their young daughter and his ever-present parents, and she plays the role of a stay at home mother and housewife while suppressing her own desires. But the man in the car with her is not her husband. Kurata, an older man who runs an architecture firm, is a ghostly, rakishly beautiful figure from Toko’s past. The two had a brief, undefined relationship ten years earlier while he was married, and a chance reunion after a decade apart offers Toko an escape from her stifling routine.
From the very start, Mishima creates the suggestion that Toko’s life with Kurata is more valuable than the one with her husband. The subtle non-linearity of the film’s structure means Kurata is the first man we see with Toko, and the short time they spend together feels significant and exciting, while her time with her husband is focused wholly on banal practicalities. Yet there’s always a sense that Toko’s choice is not as straightforward as it seems. Mishima frames Toko and Kurata through the car windscreen as they drive through the snow, but she splits them into two separate shots behind the glass and cuts back and forth between them. They’re together but apart, while her dull conversations with her conservative husband, always dressed head-to-toe in Polo Ralph Lauren, are framed in wide shots: they’re together in the same frame, but they’re never close. Neither of these men seem able to offer Toko her ideal life, but she values her freedom above the constraints of her marriage and her choice is ultimately an easy one, even if it’s not necessarily the right one in the end.
Mishima favours inference over stating things outright, and there’s an implication that the only reason the relationship between Kurata and Toko didn’t work in the past is because Kurata was unwilling to give up his marriage. Yet the superficially romantic way that he rekindles their relationship, by grabbing Toko at a party and passionately kissing her without a word, suggests that he’s every bit as possessive as her husband is. This idea of male ownership of women is inescapable in Shape of Red, but for Toko, escaping a possessive marriage is not the goal. She just wants to be in control of her life. The decision she makes might not be perfect, but it’s hers to make. It’s easy to imagine a much weaker, more explicitly dramatised version of this script, but Mishima’s careful construction (she co-wrote the film, and the non-linear structure is not in the source novel) and use of subtle, underplayed theatricality allow Shape of Red to avoid the pitfalls of melodrama and find genuine emotional resonance in Toko’s dilemma.
Koji Fukada’s A Girl Missing takes a different approach to its dramatic inclinations. The film follows Ichiko, a diligent home-care nurse who looks after an elderly, increasingly senile woman living with her daughter and two granddaughters: the youngest of whom, Saki, is in high school, while the other, Motoko, is at university. Ichiko has grown close to this family over the course of her employment, and she spends most of her time either with them or with her fiancé, a local doctor whose son sees her as a stepmother. She’s happy, but the fallout from a traumatic event that touches on both her professional and personal life sends her spiralling dramatically into an abyss. A Girl Missing has a similarly bleak view of life on earth as Harmonium, Fukada’s most celebrated work, and it explores the same central idea that our lives can be irrevocably changed by chaos, and events entirely out of our control can wash away everything we hold dear. Here, the chaos Ichiko is forced to endure is the media circus that follows when her nephew is charged with kidnapping her employer’s daughter, Saki, and her subsequent choice not to talk about her connection to this crime.
Ichiko is a quiet, diligent worker, and the people around her all like her, but once her closeness to this kidnapping comes to light her quietness is suddenly perceived as secrecy and evasiveness. There are enough gaps in Ichiko’s background to make speculation easy, and Fukada echoes this shift in perception by replacing the serene wides and gentle, gliding pans of her once peaceful day-to-day life with jagged handheld camerawork and awkward framing now that she’s under scrutiny. He keeps the character of Ichiko at arms length and allows room for sensationalist tabloid theories and bad faith misconceptions to not just fill the blanks, but to overflow and overwhelm the reality of Ichiko’s life. It’s impossible to know the totality of any person, but when, after giving her side of events, one of Ichiko’s colleagues asks: “Can I believe you?”, it’s clear that the damage has been done.
Human bitterness courses through every gesture in A Girl Missing. Motoko is in love with Ichiko without telling her, and her reaction to finding out that Ichiko is engaged to a (male) doctor is to talk to the press in an act of jealousy, re-telling a version of a story Ichiko told her about her nephew and spinning it in such a way as to portray Ichiko as a predatory, monstrous woman. Ichiko’s response to this, having lost everything in her life, is to take revenge on Motoko by seducing her boyfriend, Kazumichi. Fukada displays these two strands in parallel, cutting back and forth between the destruction of Ichiko and her quest for vengeance to gradually reveal the context that drives every decision she makes. Fukada is interested in how pieces fit together to create a picture of a person, whether that picture is correct or not, and the always unfolding non-linear structure makes a strong case for the value of context. But by focusing on the gaps in a character, Fukada is never able to give a real sense of what’s at stake for Ichiko. She’s a sketch by design, and all of her relationships are contrived to be breakable by the exact situation she finds herself in. In the end, the emotions that underpin her quest for revenge are superficial, never properly explored beyond overcast weather, grey clothing and the sad, despondent face of a woman destroyed by such superficialities.