#asami usuda

[dare-g]

Tokyo Playboy Club (2011)

[cinemaronin]

Cold Bloom (2012)

桜並木の満開の下に Cold Bloom (2012)  directed by Atsushi Funahashi

[redsamuraiii]

Shitsuren Meshi (Ep 8)

Your experience, both good and bad, is what shape you into who you are today.

[thatbitchsimone]

[thoughtfulfilm]

私をくいとめて (Hold Me Back) (2020) dir. Akiko Ōku

Hold Me Back might appear to be your typical rom-com in the trailer, but don’t let the marketing fool you.

Director Akiko Ohku uses a skilled and creative filmmaker’s eye to draw us into the experience and inner world of protagonist Mitsuko and the result is a film of unexpected nuance and depth. Right from the opening scene, the camera angles, cuts, lighting, and sound are all used cleverly to communicate Mitsuko’s experience in a way that is a big departure from your typical maintstream rom-com.

Mitsuko is a thirty-one year old officeworker who lives alone...except for the disembodied, externalised voice of her inner monologue - or should I say dialogue, known as “A”.

A gives Mitsuko advice and Mitsuko uses conversations with A to reflect and get perspective on her thoughts, actions and decisions.

Mitsuko works in an office with her friend and colleague Nozomi and corresponds with her friend Satsuki who lives in Rome.

Mitsuko has a few encounters with Tada, who she meets at work and whom she discovers lives in her neighbourhood.

The film explores Mitsuko’s approach to being “solo” and independent, her fear of flying and panic attacks, and her ambivalence negotiating internalised social norms and expectations around adulthood, and intimacy. The latter is compounded by some past experiences of harassment alluded to by Mitsuko in some of her internal dialogue. The themes concern relationships with men who could be love interests, female friends, and male and female staff at work. It sounds dense on paper, but the film manages to explore these themes in a way that is comic and creative and constantly engaging. There are plenty of laughs and the brilliance of Ohku’s screenplay and direction is that they creep up on you from under the bright and funny surface.

Mitsuko’s internal voice, “A”, is male and adopts a paternal benevolent tone that nonetheless is shown to encourage decisions that are not in Mitsuko’s best interest at times, or suggest she is “over-emotional” at others.

The two male colleagues are juxtaposed against eachother, with one painted as comically proud and confident, and the other as shy and timid. However, both characters demonstrate a lack of awareness of the inherent inequality of gender roles around care-taking and how these feed into adult heterosexual relationship dynamics.

The primary “romantic” element of this “romcom” is replaced by the more realistic relationship of awkward convenience. Hold Me Back is ultimately a depiction of people attempting to fumblingly assuage the commonplace experience of adult isolation from human intimacy.

At times the film has a playful, feel. And this technical approach in combination with the depiction of an atypical and rich inner world of the heroine almost harks back to the manic-pixie dream girl films of the early 2000s à la Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie or with the wistful eclectic style of Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep. But although the film uses these techniques, it shows how far storytelling has moved on from that trope. Instead the film explores, via creative visual storytelling and screenwriting, Mitsuko’s experiences of gendered social conditioning and trauma, and her anxiety and mental health. In this sense the device if Mitsuko’s inner dialogue with A more resembles Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag than anything else. Most importantly, these experiences are explored in pursuit of her development and growth as an adult woman negotiating contemporary society and how to find purpose, safety, and connection in it, rather than fetishised as a cutesy trait for the consumption of the male gaze.

The screening I watched had a video message from the director at the start and what struck me was that she commented that she was satisfied with the end result. That kind of statement is so rare, but after seeing the film, I feel any storyteller would be satisfied at the rich, complex, and entertaining film that Hold Me Back is.

I’m really curious to discuss this film with a woman or someone who is not cis male who has lived as an adult in Japan. Please, if you’ve seen it message me.

[yua]

the north face 2018 spring/summer 

[purisuka]

[thatbitchsimone]