Yôkame no semi

When her affair with a married man unravels, an unhinged Kiwako kidnaps her ex-lover's newborn daughter, Erina, and raises her as her own.

The storyline begins in the courtroom four years later with an unapologetic Kiwako, and a bitter and vengeful mother of the child. At this point, with only the barest information available, as often happens in our tabloid-saturated societies, our sympathies are firmly with the mother. The film then juxtaposes the life of Kiwako on the run, with the present-day Erina, and the immediate aftermath of the return of the child to her birth mother.

This structure succeeds in making us question our initial responses to the main players. This is most effectively achieved by the performances of Hiromi Nagasaku and Mao Inoue. Nagasaku as the needy, bereft, jilted lover and kidnapper superbly humanises the 'monster' of tabloid headlines. Her tenderness with the child and devotion to her motherly role are so engrossing that one is shocked when a cut juxtaposes the callous act that brought these events about. Inoue is rootless and disconnected, emphasised by the fact that her own perfunctory romance is with a married man. When Chigusa shows up and forces her to re-visit her past and re-evaluate her present, Inoue's portrayal of the emotional journey is pleasingly subtle and raw. So perfectly under-stated is her acting here that it is hard to believe that she is the same actress who mugged her way through My Darling is a Foreigner.

Eiko Koike's casting as the emotionally crippled Chigusa is a gamble, but it pays off with a memorable shift. Less acceptable is Gekidan Hitori's wooden stint as the boyfriend. He's clearly out of his depth.

As with the casting, plot-wise some elements work better than others. The film is strongest when it stays resolutely with Kiwako and Erina trying to make sense of their actions. A journey to Okayama becomes heavy-handed product placement for the prefecture's tourism sector, with a twee rendering of life on Inland Sea islands, a region facing severe demographic problems in real life. The clunkiest moment however is a sequence when Kiwako takes refuge with a religious cult, whose manga-esque guru is comically overblown.

The couple who lose their child are also misrepresented. The mother's histrionics become insufferable. The father is reduced to a bit player, a bizarre decision given his catalytic role in events. His emotional turmoil, no doubt momentous, is regrettably left unexplored. A swelling, manipulative soundtrack tries too hard for sentimentality.

At over two hours the film takes too long to get to its destination. You could actually watch large chunks on fast-forward and not really miss anything, the pace is that slow. However, the ending packs a punch, especially Kiwako's realisation that she has to let go. Great to see two female leads displaying outstanding skills in a Japanese film.

The relationship with the past is a complex question for a nation that still lives with the legacy of the war, the reality of the experience of seismic and nuclear destruction, an attack on tradition and cultural values in the changing modern world and the prospect of ruinous economic decline. Izuru Narushima's 2011 film REBIRTH, the winner of no less than 11 awards at the 2012 Japanese Academy Awards, deals with the no less complex question of an individual's personal relationship with the past. but it hints at other issues that have resonance for the Japanese in the traumatised childhood of one individual who needs to confront fundamental questions about her own identity if she is not to repeat mistakes made in the past.

REBIRTH plays out initially very much as a tragic melodrama of an abducted baby, and you would think that this would be a sufficiently emotive subject on its own, but the film's opening sequence the viewer in a way that draws them much more deeply into the wider implications of the drama. Presented in the form of a court case, the shocking details are laid out to reveal how Erina was abducted by her father's mistress Kiwako (Hiromi Nagasaku) while she was only a newborn child. Having recently had an abortion, Kiwako has stolen the child from her lover and his wife to make up for her own terrible loss. It's only four years later when the law catches up with them that Erina discovers her true identity, that her name is not Kaoru and that Kiwako is not her birth-mother. This information is presented to the viewer in the court, the accused and the accuser speaking directly face-on to the camera - one calm and collected as she is sentenced, the other screaming out for her death.

The confrontational manner of the opening sequence and its direct appeal to the viewer however hints at a more personal angle that REBIRTH goes on to examine in the remainder of the film. It takes the fragmented perspective of an older Erina (Mao Inoue), now a young woman working as a waitress in a bar, who has never known any stability in her life or been able to forge a meaningful connection with her real birth-mother. The flashback episodes to her past, to the abduction and to an unconventional upbringing on the road and on the run are not merely a narrative device to gradually reveal backstory, but an integral part of how Erina with her confused dual identity relates to the world. The structure however has another purpose, showing events in parallel in order to relate the real crux of Erina's dilemma. Pregnant to a married man, she now finds herself in a similar position to the "mother" who abducted her. How can she prevent herself making the same mistakes as Kiwako?

That's still very much a personal dilemma, but there are suggestions that this necessary sense of reflection on the past, of learning lessons and the need to be "reborn" relate to wider questions of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be Japanese and what it means to be a Japanese woman. In the way that it confronts these issues however, REBIRTH never takes a simplistic or conventional view and it never accepts that there is even an absolute moral position to take. It doesn't, for example, make it easy to even determine who is more guilty - the woman who abducted Erina as a child and lovingly brought her up, or a traumatised mother who is unable to forgive and reconnect with her own child. Neither of them entirely deserve condemnation, both of them in a way are victims of circumstance (and a married man's indiscretion), but it's Kaoru/Erina in the middle who evidently suffers most over what has happened and needs to find some kind of answer or accommodation with such impossible questions.

Society, and a society that is as strongly patriarchal as Japan, is seen as being partly to blame, but again it's not so much an accusation as a recognition of the problems that have been inherited from the past. The malaise or corruption at the core of society and the dangers associated with it are mentioned in passing in reference to the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Underground by the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, but it is also a kind of cult that gives shelter to Kiwako and Kaoru without asking any questions. There are certainly some sinister elements to the Angel Home and the cult's eccentric leader, but it is essentially a shelter for women who need to escape from the world for their own personal reasons. Without necessarily condoning the idea of cults, it's the film's openness to consider "alternative" ways of living that is the key here. Freedom to choose is what is important, and it's another young woman from Erina's past who proposes a way of reopening those avenues closed off by her unconventional upbringing, and a way to avoid making the same mistakes.

Formally, REBIRTH is a beautifully constructed film in its use of colours and tones, in its choice of music, in how it uses and paces its length (two and a half hours long) to give the characters - anchored by some very fine acting performances - room to breathe. It also gives the viewer time to reflect on their nature through the choice of locations it places them in and in the use of contrasting landscapes. It does indeed then turn into a road-movie as Erina retraces her childhood upbringing looking for answers, a voyage of self-discovery and a turn to nature of sorts as Erina leaves Tokyo for the remote parts of Japan, but the film never settles for conventional revelations or resolutions, using the journey rather to create a sense of space and freedom that allows new possibilities to be considered. In doing so, the film explores what it means to be human and come to terms with our place in the world with a remarkable sense of intimacy, but it also suggests that there is potential for discovering greater beauty and true freedom in the infinite sense of possibilities that are open to us all if we can break those bonds of the past.

While 'Rebirth' - or 'The Eighth-Day Cicada', if translated directly from the Japanese - was an enormous critical success in Japan, raking in 11 wins at the 2012 Japan Academy Awards, it has so far received little attention outside of the country. The reason may be its extraordinarily slow pace, and a content that could be interpreted as very domestic.

The story itself is quickly summarized: a woman abducts the baby of the man she's been having an affair with; he had previously convinced her of having an abortion, in the process of which she lost her fertility. His wife, catching wind of the affair, confronts her with her own pregnancy, mocking her barren state with a cruel metaphor that resurfaces at various points in the movie. So initially the abduction appears to be motivated by revenge, but right from the introductory court hearing it is clear that the reasons go far beyond that. The main story is about the adult child, now herself pregnant with a married man's child, and set to discover the link between her present and her past. The Japanese title is frequently referenced as the fact of cicadas nestling in the ground for years, only to die seven days after hatching - it is the mystery of this film to make sense of what the 'Eighth Day Cicada' might be, a mystery not resolved until the final climatic, yet perfectly still, sequence.

What makes this indeed one of the best Japanese films of late are, next to a wonderful script and flawless photography to go with it, the female performances. Hiromi Nagasaku, a prolific TV actress whom I haven't seen in a lead before, gets an incredible amount of close-ups for her role of the abductress, and therefore the chance to convey the development of her character almost exclusively through facial expression. This asks for a lot of patience at times, but as the story grows on the spectator, it is actually a very skillful plot device by director Izuru Narushima, whose most famous film so far is probably 'Fly Daddy fly" (2005). While Mao Inoue (another TV actress so far) expresses her character of the grown-up child with expressions of void, reservation, calm aggression, Hiromi Nagasaku's character frets, suffers, fears. Yet in the course of the film, the two women who never meet become more and more alike in their situation, isolation, weakness.

In short, this is a top-notch character-driven drama and one of the best women-themed films I've ever seen: mysterious yet simple, emotional yet calm, sometimes agonizing, often serene, extremely mature, yet always comprehensible.