Visions of fear. In Neo Sora’s Happyend, the Japan of the future is under attack from the natural world. An impending earthquake has been forecast, and this society lives in its shadow, with its threat used as a means for right-wing politicians to impose invasive rules and laws in the name of public safety. Follow the rules and survive. Break the rules and put everyone in danger. A culture of fear, in which to not abide by the rules of the group is the same as acting against it. And so racism flourishes, and violence, and hate, and the cycle of fear perpetuates itself. The generations that lived through Fukushima keep voting in the fascists, and the young have to live with their choices. Sora centres the film around a group of students in a Tokyo high school in the early 2040s (a date gleaned only from a few posters on the wall) as they try to live normal teenage lives: hanging out, listening to music, smoking, falling in love, breaking rules. But all in a constant state of invisible anxiety, waiting for an inevitable disaster that never comes. Alarms sound regularly on phones and rooms shake again and again. But it’s never as bad as it could’ve been. Maybe the next one will be.
Following an elaborate but seemingly harmless prank, which their headteacher tellingly and po-facedly describes as an act of terrorism, an AI driven surveillance system is launched in the school, tracking the students’ every move and penalising any rule breaking within the scope of its many, many cameras. This school is a microcosm of Japan, and these teenagers, not content to be placed under scrutiny, are forced to confront reality. Sora frames the film directly from the student’s eyes, and portrays their political awakenings exactly as they would experience them: messily, fervently, urgently. A first step into the real world, taken wholeheartedly with the intent to change things for the better. And they do drive change, just not on their terms. And so Happyend becomes a film of firsts: loves, heartbreaks; and first encounters with the slipperiness of an authoritarian political hierarchy willing to do anything to stay in power.
A similar desire to break free from (very different) forces of control is the driving force behind Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour. Set in the 1910s, Edward, a British diplomat, waits on a pier in Rangoon for his fiancée, Molly, to arrive on a boat from England. He hasn’t seen her for seven years, and has doubts about the idea of marrying her. Impulsively, he runs away, jumping on the first boat out of town and embarking on a sprawling journey across Asia, stopping in Singapore and Bangkok, Manila and Saigon, Shanghai and Osaka. On and on. City after city after city, never staying in one place for long before moving quickly onto another. Gomes first shows Edward’s attempts to escape, and then jumps back to Molly as she, not to be deterred, chases after him, picking up his trail again and again as he fruitlessly tries to shake her off.
He chooses to run. She chooses to follow. A film about the ability to practise one’s own autonomy in a continent colonised by outsiders. An irony not lost on Gomes, who frequently underlines this outsider’s perspective by cutting between narrative images shot on a soundstage, vivid and ghostly, and documentary footage of the same locations in the present day, some in black and white, some in colour. All combining to form a stereotypical depiction of the countries and cities that Edward and Molly once passed through a century before: mopeds, puppet shows, mahjong, fortune tellers, martial arts displays; touristic images to create an outsider’s view of Asia as one single, amorphous entity. For Gomes, this colonial gaze is how Edward and Molly, perhaps unwittingly, turn the continent into a playground. A film viewed through the eyes of two people who think they know these places but haven’t even begun to understand them. And as they find themselves moving through China, through Chengdu and beyond, deeper and deeper inland and further and further from the port cities that opened up the world for them, they separately begin to lose their bearings, their senses, and, ultimately, themselves. A romantic film that morphs and shifts into a perilous one. A century of misunderstanding, of false confidence built on hubris, held within one man’s fear of the world he left behind, and an embrace of a world he will never make sense of. A century of refusing to engage, coming home to roost.