Review by Beatrice On 10-Sep-2023
To relate an individual to the whole world: this is the meaning of cinema.
In what remains of an old restaurant in a town destroyed by war and fire Shuri prostitutes herself. She a very good cook has no more customers and lives in total alienation: her son and husband are dead from the conflict and there is only despair in her eyes.
A veteran soldier from the Philippines arrives, apparently shy, pays her to spend a night with her. This is repeated the next day and the days after that but the man has no more money and promises to pay. Meanwhile, a child, whom Shuri calls a "stray dog" because he lives by stealing food from the nearby black market, often comes to the house, and the former elementary school teacher soldier hands him an algebra notebook.
Thus, day by day a whimsical family is built, where each seeks a nucleus in which to continue to believe and for which to continue to live: the now lonely and desperate woman, the soldier, evidently traumatized by the war, with heated outbursts of anger, and the child who tries to survive as best he can.
But that illusory glimpse that has been created, always precarious and disturbed, is further fragmented by the presence of a gun, which the child must hand over, thus living a further traumatic experience: when he returns, even that shred of life has been dismembered. The woman wanders lonely and desperate in her house-restaurant-bordello, the soldier lives along with other war victims in an underground tunnel of marginalization, abandonment, and madness. But the child goes looking for him, as he tries to return to the woman who for a few moments made him feel recognized: so he seeks work, lends himself to any occupation and violence in order to try to rebuild that segment of life and warmth.
The final scene will be a further fall into the underworld of survival of one who has already touched the misery of despair and is trying to live a ghostly condition, wandering among violence, ruins, cruelty and human folly.
The child's gaze traces the entire plot of the film, tearing and drawing in the disquiet that unrelentingly pervades the play's examination.
It is no ordinary experience that Tsukamoto has managed to construct: the horror of war can be represented in many ways, and the Japanese director has been dealing with this theme for some time. Here the gaze is intimate yet universal, terrible and illusory, dreamlike and chilling. The woman, the child, and the soldier are spectres living an ultimate reality, where each seeks relief from pain and loneliness albeit minimal, partial, and in vain.
Tsukamoto's is an indelible lesson in cinema that starts from the theme of the body and its declinations, of war and death, of the corruptions, mutations, psychoses that result, always violent and disturbing yet poetic and heartbreaking: a gaze that leads inside that intimacy and leaves one lifeless and thunderstruck for interminable moments.
The human skin of things, the dermis of reality, this is what cinema plays with first and foremost.
10-Sep-2023 by Beatrice