I was just saying the other day that you never hear of Japanese movies any more except for Anime - their place in the world-movie pantheon seems to have been usurped by Korean cinema, and then we watched this. I loved it. It's a small (although not in length - it's a hair under three hours!), intimate, rather earnest film. Very leisurely paced, and without great drama, yet I found it engrossing and rewarding. Essentially, the main character (that's him, leaning on his vintage 1987 red Saab 900 Turbo) is an early-middle-aged theater director (previously stage actor, previously TV actor) whom we see in the first half-hour-or-so living a quiet life with his wife
in their apartment which is a sanctuary of analog (they listen to actual records of classical music and dress impeccably while sipping on beautiful mugs of tea) having lots of sex, which triggers her imagination for the stories she has taken to writing after the death of their daughter (about 19 years ago) drove her away from her career as an actress. She now also writes screenplays for the TV, and in an early scene brings her lead actor, a young man in his early 20s, to be introduced to our protagonist after his performance as Uncle Vanya. Not long after, after our man has left for the airport to fly to a festival in Vladivostok, only to be thwarted at the airport by inclement weather and return unexpectedly, he walks in on the wife having sex with this same young man. Neither sees him, and he leaves quietly, and when he Skypes with his wife later that night he pretends the hotel room he's taken at the airport is actually in Vladivostok. We only find out later that this is not the first time, and it doesn't undermine his love for her. But then one day [minor spoiler] she says to him as he leaves for the day that she really wants to talk to him about something that evening, and of course he expects everything to be laid bare. So he delays returning home, and when he does return, late that night, she is unconscious on the floor. She has had a brain aneurysm and never wakes up. And we're not even a quarter way into the film!
Oh, I forgot to mention: after the cuckolding incident he has a minor crash (not enough to spoil the beautiful red paintwork) and it turns out he's got glaucoma in one eye, and has to take drops. I thought this was going to be the reason why he has to hire a driver, but no, its sole purpose seems to be to demonstrate that his wife still loves him dearly because she is obviously distraught and rushes to the hospital.
Anyway, cut to some time later, and he drives to a workshop in Hiroshima where he will put on another production of his specialty: a version of Uncle Vanya where the parts are all spoken in the native language of his multinational cast. (I know, I don't get it either, and the preciousness of the whole enterprise might be enough to put one off the movie, but it doesn't. Somehow.) This is when he gets the driver, not because he has glaucoma, but because the organizers insist on it, because a previous artist they sponsored ran somebody over and now the money comes with strings (i.e., an assigned driver) attached. This pisses our guy off considerably, because he's specifically asked for a house an hour's drive away so that he can listen to tapes (yes, actual cassette tapes - the director is clearly very much a Gen-X'er) of Uncle Vanya (or, at least, all the parts of Uncle Vanya other than Vanya, with spaces for him to say his lines, at least, when he was still playing the part), recorded by his wife. But the organizers put their feet down, and his driver, a very deadpan (and short) young (turns out she's 23 - the exact age his daughter would have been if she hadn't died of pneumonia aged 4) woman, turns out to be an amazing driver, and he finds he is able to forget she's there and do the tapes as planned.
Actors from all over Asia have applied to be in the play... including the young man he walked in on his wife having sex with (who has since been involved in a scandal where he slept with a minor, and torpedoed his burgeoning star career). Our hero (whose name is Mr. Kafuku) casts the young man, not as the age-appropriate role he auditions for, but as Vanya. He also casts a mute Korean actress who speaks in (Korean) sign language, along with Mandarin and regular Japanese-speakers, completing his polyglot cast. Is this going to be a revenge thing, you wonder? Why is he being so hard on the cast? Why did he cast his romantic rival, who keeps wanting to speak to him about his dead wife?
Wasn't it amazing that one of the workshop organizers happened to speak Korean Sign Language? What's the driver's deal - why is she so stoic? How did she come to be a driver? All will (slowly) be revealed, in a film that preaches self-forgiveness and the healing power of Chekhov. All in all, three deaths feature, all of which can be blamed in some way on someone other than the person who dies, but there are no outlandish murder-mystery subplots, nor any love story other than that of our hero and his dead wife. But watch it before it wins best picture at the Oscars and is ruined forever. Trust me, the three hours fly by. All the actors are very good, and my only quibble is that I don't think that the wife's sex-dream-stories would make very filmable scripts. I mean, I get that you could film a story of a girl sneaking into her crush's bedroom every day and leaving a memento, but how could you film her past life as a lamprey?
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