Farewell to the Summer Light

"No! Until death, I will walk throughout Europe. No. At the time of the tide, this abandoned church at sea, it's me." 'Hiroshima Mon Amor' in reverse: Japan's critical eye on Europe, via the New Wave (Resnais in particular), a beautifully-shot tourist travelogue with things to say about history, memory and global impasse in the guise of a slow-burning drama of forbidden infatuation. The film was shot in the months following the May 68 uprisings, and while Yoshida would address political radicalism in far more depth in his following films, the dilemmas of moving from old to new, of moving out from the shadow of monuments to and of despotism and aesthetic utopianism (cathedrals, coliseums, chateaux) are evident in every frame of this film as well. Impeccably shot-every frame composed with an eye to natural light, shadow, and the framing of figures within a landscape-Yoshida's is a film of endless wandering without fixed destination, a travelogue saturated with tourist hotspots-Rome's Coliseum, Paris's Eiffel Tower, Lisbon's Belem Tower or Jeronimos Monastery, Finisterre, the western-most point in Europe-which serve as reminders of place and history whose protagonists feel themselves unmoored yet bound to history, time and the logics of itineraries, discoveries and destinations as the film's two protagonists cross paths, follow or flee from each other across half a dozen European cities while half-conducting an illicit affair.

The burden of European influence manifested in the film's visual and stylistic sensibility is the very centre of its narrative drama. Rather than the existential alienation of the European bourgeoisie so famously depicted by Antonioni or Fellini or Resnais in their own films of heterosexual wandering-for which the devastation of the second world war was a kind of vague, discomforting underlay-this film is explicitly about Japan-specific trauma: the explosion of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki two decades before. That this drama is 'peripheral' to the narrative (there's nothing like the opening sequences of 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' to slam home to viewers the existence of the nuclear massacres) is part of its argument. Makoto searches for the original European model for a church destroyed in the Nagasaki bombings, through a drawing glimpsed in the Nagasaki museum; Naoko has fled to Europe precisely in order to flee the memory of Nagasaki.

The film ends with the title 'summer 1968', and it's implied that the student may have some connection to political radicalism-a French poster against the cops on the wall of an apartment. Yoshida would follow this film-the latest in a length series of what have become known as 'anti-melodramas' which, like Farewell, star his wife, actor Mariko Okada-with a trilogy on left-wing radicalism: 'Eros + Massacre', 'Heroic Purgatory', and 'Coup d'Etat' a more explicit engagement with the entanglements of romance, eroticism and history in the complex and messy business of conceptualising new modes of social(ist) relation and the violence imbricated with the attendant struggle for power. Here, however, little is spoken of politics or of a life outside the abstracted world of the tourist's sojourn from the constraints of time, place and routine, the comforting alienation of wandering in a place where you don't speak the language. This is, of course, precisely the point. The jet-setting role of the international bourgeoisie-whether in business or the intelligentsia-pretends to erase national distinctions (Americans in Paris, Japanese in Europe, Americans in Japan, and so on) in ways that only underscore the collaborative nature of international capital in conjunction (and occasional contradiction) with the racist nationalism of state power. The quests of both characters may displace the trauma of Nagasaki, yet their presence, as fellow Japanese in a world of Europeans, see them alienated from the trappings of European history and culture that so ostentatiously loom over the characters, and they cannot help but remind themselves of the land they've left behind. "It is always like that when I meet a Japanese abroad", muses Naoko in the voiceover describing their first meeting. "Me, I am Japanese without being Japanese." "You seemed so deeply to appreciate this conversation in Japanese", Makoto responds. "No, to escape my own appearance, I started a disjointed conversation". It's perhaps too easy to read this 'disjointed conversation' as a formal analogue for the film itself-whether that conversation be between the protagonists, between Europe and Japan, past and present, the intimacies of human romantic relation and the abstractions of historical artefacts. Yoshida notes that the voiceover in part arose from working methods-the entire film was shot with a five person crew (Yoshida, the two actors, and two technicians, along with local assistance), as a mobile unit moving across the seven countries where the film was shot with only the briefest skeleton of a scenario, improvising with location, action and dialogue as they went (and in that sense enacting the constant, yet desultory movement of the scenario itself). Overlaying so much of the film in Duras-like dialogic voiceover may emphasize the 'interiors', the inner voices of the characters-an impossible dialogue of all that lies unspoken-but at the same time, even here, much lies unspoken. The ways of repression run deep; what's spoken even in thought is carefully composed, arrange, full of hints and suggestions, and sometimes, of sudden revelations, but too invested in self-protection to fully vent what lies beneath.

This was the first Yoshishige Yoshida film I'd seen in a while, and I don't know... it kind of reminded me why I'm not a huge fan of his style. Farewell to the Summer Light looks like it'll be a more approachable effort from the filmmaker on the surface, what with its set-up surrounding some kind of forbidden love, coupled with the striking images, not to mention it's also got a fairly lean runtime.

But it ends up feeling kind of tedious, just one scene after another that all feel very similar. That could be the point, but I still didn't really like the experience of watching it. It starts on one level, and then just stays there, on and on, before it eventually ends. It looks good in parts, and there's almost definitely some deeper meaning I'm not picking up on, but all I really got out of it was some creative cinematography, some interesting locations shot at, and a runtime that thankfully didn't test my patience as much as it could've.

I'm lucky enough to have a source of these Japanese new wave films. Some of them are wonderful. Some, like this, are just typical but radical experiments.

The setup here is a couple. They are both Japanese. She is married to a European, is haunted by the Nagasaki bomb which killed her father. The two are in love. That's all you need to know about the story.

Its the staging of the thing that matters. Each scene lasts a minute or so and is a different location. They span much of Europe, the capitals of the Old Europe. The two walk past each other. Face each other. Face away. Each scene is based on one movement or stance, usually photographed from a distance. Many of these within the location and between locations use radical jump cuts, sometimes overlapping in time.

That's it. That's the experiment. Space, vacuum, distance, passing.

The version I saw had handmade subtitles that were a literal translation by a non-English speaker. They were spookily abstract, and fit the mood.

I've noted it elsewhere: these experiments aren't films in the sense that they connect. They're essays, experiments, concept statements, sketches. They need to be judged differently, but they almost always are better when made in Japan. Here, that pull is the driver of the thing: the visiting of Japan in the European space; the pull back to the land; the embodiment of touch is the pull and everything else is merely the space, the acquired context.

It almost works.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.