Undo (1994)

Director:

Shunji Iwai

Writer:

Shunji Iwai (writer)

Release Date:

7 October 1994 (Japan)

Tagline:

Let's start over again...

Plot:

Moemi is not overly pleased when Yukio brings home a couple of turtles to keep her company. Although Yukio works at home as a writer...

Awards:

2 wins

Cast

Etsushi Toyokawa	...	Yukio
Tomoko Yamaguchi	...	Moemi
Tomorowo Taguchi	...	Psychiatrist

Runtime:

47 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Certification:

South Korea:15 | Hong Kong:IIA

Jonas' Wings

Not all that good, really, but...

Every other Iwai film I've seen (ref. my comment at Love Letter ) has been mappable. Each defined spaces. Watching each you know, to varying extents, how to move around in its unique world. This isn't true of Undo. Even though most of it takes place in the young couple's apartment, this residence is made of disconnected shots. Though you can see the place in the DVD's "making of," in the film it could have been sewn together from shots of three or four sets. The shrink's office, the peopled hill apparently outside the apartment, the river's-edge idyl are equally detached. If the film resembles any other Iwai, it's Yentown , aka Swallowtail Butterfly but this is mainly a matter of lighting and color choices, both films warm, fuzzy. Nothing's as distinct as the worlds of the later Love Letter or April Story. Undo's parts are linked, instead of by geometry, by thematic images: braces, cord, knots. At worst, it can seem nothing but set-up for payoff shots: turtle bound and suspended in sunlit window.

Again, banish all thought of madness. Imagine instead you're being guided by Rivers and Tides' Andy Goldsworthy. The young woman tries to wrap thread around soapsuds quivering on a fingertip. See Rivers and Tides to know Goldsworthy would do this if he could. Leash, not as restraint, but as line. Knot, not as lock, but as node. Keep fetish bondage out of your mind, see just cord, lines. Fetish stuff tends to symmetrical, because the human form is symmetrical. Everything here tends away and awry. Undo 's later extremes are weblike at a glance but without even a spider's adaptive symmetry.

Everything I've said to avoid may come to you anyway. Or may not. Just, don't seek it. The shortcut risks missing too much. And ask yourself, by the way, why the film is named instantly in English, with phonetic guidance for non-speakers: Àndú.

Another touchpoint's Umizaki (the manga's way better than the film). Yet another, and I'm not sure why, there being no flight in Undo unless in the word's other sense, is Alain Tanner's Les Années lumière. Maybe Undo 's bindings and the rigging for Jonas' wings suggest each other. (The 1980 film's a sort of sequel to Jonas qui auras 25 en l'an 2000 , but there's another later, 1999, sort-of sequel Jonas et Lila, à demain ) I want to cite another director, Japanese, from a series some past decade at the Pacific Film Archive, whose color features include long pans following cord or sash over landscapes into buildings to end sometime in fetish bindings, but the name's lost to me.