In short: One Day, You Will Reach the Sea (2022)

Even years later, Mana (Yukino Kishii) hasn’t been able to emotionally let go of her friend Sumire (Minami Hamabe) who disappeared during the tsunamis of 2011. In flashbacks, the film shows their friendship as well as the course of Mana’s grief that may eventually end in some kind of healing through Mana’s eyes. Eventually, we’ll also witness some of the same scenes from Sumire’s perspective.

Ryutaro Nakagawa’s film is aesthetically quite typical of this sort of Japanese artsy fare, with decidedly pretty photography, and using as little dialogue as is necessary. The film’s rhythm is slow and thoughtful, with shots that go much longer than most American filmmakers outside of explicitly slow cinema circles would even dare, and scenes that take their time, but also have a point in taking their time.

This is, after all, a film about the quiet moments, about silence, about the things not said yet still expressed; also, a film about queer longing and desire that can’t or won’t be expressed or fulfilled, not in a high level dramatic or hand-wringing tragical way – after the films of his I’ve seen, I doubt Nakagawa believes in that sort of thing or at the very least has very little interest in it – but one that feels in keeping with the characters’ nature, Mana’s painful interiority, as well as Sumire’s inability to express anything like an authentic self directly.

If you let yourself fall into the film’s rhythm, you’ll probably find quite a bit of emotional truth and depth to much of what is happening (or not happening) on screen, in Nakagawa’s calm and quiet method for lending a voice to people whose truths are very often not voiced, while keeping to the tone that fits them. From time to time, particularly in the final act, there are moments where the emotional honesty One Day aims at may feel bordering on the kitschy or sentimental to some, but I prefer to think Nakagawa is just being the kind of genuine here that doesn’t care if you think he’s getting sentimental or not. I, for my part, found myself deeply moved by much of the film, its care for little gestures and silences, the quiet and deeply human performances by Kishii and Hamabe, and its sense for the intersections of editing rhythms and the rhythms of human emotions.

Three Films Make A Post: Something wonderful is about to happen

Fantasma aka Bloody Ballet (2018): This indie production directed by Bret Mullen clearly wants to be an 80s giallo, starting with its original title (apparently, the ballet title is the ill-advised work of the distributor, who really didn’t understand the film’s audience in the least), continuing through lighting, production design, the script’s use of mental illness (which nobody should confuse with an attempt at portraying actual mental illness and be offended by), plotting, acting style and camera work. At times, it’s about as cool an emulation of its chosen style as can be, but there are also quite a few scenes that simply go on too long, and double the amount of dream sequences needed. None of that makes the movie unwatchable or unlikeable, but these problems do keep the movie down enough to keep it from being as good the better of its predecessors.

Tokyo Sunrise (2015): I didn’t like this male-centric sort of road movie by Ryutaro Nakagawa quite as much as his Summer Blooms and Mio on the Shore. In fact, in theme and partial road movie structure, it feels like a bit of a warm-up for Summer Blooms. The film never quite convinced me that its flashback elements were necessary and wouldn’t have better been simply implied (as most of these things would be in those later films by the director), and its metaphorical level seems a bit blunt and too obvious. On the other hand, there are still some great scenes throughout the film; just in this one, you have to wade through less great ones to get to them.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984): A director needs a certain amount of guts to dare make a sequel to Kubrick’s 2001 (quite a few people I know argue Arthur C. Clarke never should have written his sequels either), so if nothing else, you have to give Peter Hyams (who also produced, wrote and was the director of photography) that. If a viewer goes in expecting something close to the tone and style of the Kubrick movie, they are bound to be disappointed, for Hyams’s idea of science fiction is a rather different one. It is concerned with the contrast between the political tensions/madness on Earth and space, and the need to leave these divisions behind to be able to reach understanding of the cosmos, not so much on a spiritual level, but a practical one.

If you’re willing to go with that, this actually turns out to be a rather great film, with the lived in naturalistic feeling of technology you’d expect of Hyams (see Outland, Project Capricorn), fine performances by Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren, and one of the better variations of American filmmakers’ sad obsession with aliens pressing humanity into peace by threatening us with genocide.

Mio on the Shore (2019)

Original title: わたしは光をにぎっている

Quiet and socially awkward orphan Mio (Honoka Matsumoto) has been helping her aunt and her grandmother with the family inn in Nagano. When her grandmother is hospitalized (I assume in the Japanese version of a hospice) and her aunt decides to sell the inn, she is sent to Tokyo to get on her own feet there. Until she can afford it, she is living with an old buddy of her father’s, Kyosuke (Ken Mitsuishi), the owner of a traditional bath house. He’s rather rough around the edges, and clearly desperately sad, so the first encounters between the grumpy older man and the painfully shy young woman are difficult. It doesn’t help the situation that Mio’s really not made for the kind of part time jobs she can get, lacking in confidence and social courage.

Eventually, she starts helping Kyosuke out in the bath house, slowly winning confidence, a new social circle, and perhaps the perspective on a future and a life that fits her.

Mio on the Shore by Ryutaro Nakagawa is so quiet and unassuming in its manner – not unlike its protagonist though not as awkward - one might easily overlook just how good it actually is. In fact, it may very well be one of the best coming of age movies made by anyone, not grasping for the bizarrely heroic tone the genre can sometimes take on particularly in American hands, but treating most of what’s happening in it with a calm eye for the tragedies and small triumphs in the lives of people that don’t quite fit into the modern world, for reasons of class, of personal character, or simply of bad luck, without going the poverty porn route or having Frances McDormand go around interviewing amateur actors.

It’s a film all about small gestures, except for that one moment when it suddenly goes into a rousing diatribe against gentrification, which I found confusing but not unfitting and that scene of transcendent insight Mio is granted eventually, both of which are treated so personally and intimate, they never feel like the wrong grand gestures for the film. Otherwise, this really is a film all about small changes, the shift in Mio’s posture when she starts dare talking to people as if she started recognizing herself as one of them, the way her eyes start to meet those of others, if only a little, and sometimes. Which is as honest a way of treating her and her developing view of the world as you’d encounter in a movie, lacking all the kitschy patronizing this sort of thing can all too often end up with. Matsumoto is fantastic in the role, using glances, and body language that I found nearly painfully authentic, all the while avoiding the threat of turning Mio into a caricature instead of a living human being.

Typically for a Japanese film, Mio is very interested in the culturally specificity of people and places, not out of conservatism, but because these specifics are what have shaped its main character, and built the society in where she looks for a place not so much to fit in as for one to belong. There’s a quiet insistence on the social aspects of life here too, as well as a realization that it’s not enough for any human to find a place and people that allow her to fit in, but also one she wants to belong to, and feel at home in. There’s a pretty obvious criticism of modern life (in Japan and elsewhere) here, but Mio on the Shore isn’t a polemical, nor a didactic, film. Rather, it is one that uses the personal and the specific to open up an understanding of the world.