Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park Yu-rim, Jin Dae-yeon, Sonia Yuan, Perry Dizon
Distributor: Potential Films
Runtime: 179 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Strong sex scenes

After his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. There, he begins to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.

This is a multi-awarded Japanese film, winning Best Screenplay in Cannes, 2021, and the Ecumenical (Catholics and Protestants) Prize. It is based on some short stories in a collection entitled Men Without Women. And, this is partly the theme of this film version.

It needs to be noted that the film runs for three hours. Some audiences have been exhilarated. Some have found the film hard going – and the suggestion might be that the film is an interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the director listening to tapes as he is driven to work, cast readings, rehearsals, some scenes of performance, the screenplay relying on the audience identifying with the text, finding the text a way into understanding the characters and their personal crises and dilemmas. And, part of the finale is quite a moving ending of the play.

In fact, the film opens with a 40-minute prologue, introducing the central characters, the actor and director, Yusuke Kafuku (a pleasingly restrained, and often understated performance by Nishijima) and his wife, Oto, who shares stories and details with him as she writes screenplays for television. There is a loving relationship between the two, but some sad undertones, the death of their daughter from pneumonia at the age of four, the effect on Oto and her relationships with men.

For a moment, with a scene from Waiting for Godot, suggestions are that the film is going to be tragic. It does have some tragic moments but, as with Uncle Vanya, there is a long and complex road towards peace and some redemption.

After the prologue, the action takes up, two years later, in the city of Hiroshima (and the audience is treated to various vistas of the city as well Is the local countryside and an island with a beautiful views of the sea). Kafuku has been invited as guest director at a local theatre festival, intending to put on, as expected, Uncle Vanya. Applications for auditions have been made by cast from Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and there are various readings. There is a striking audition by a young woman who is mute but can hear. She has a Korean background and acts through sign language (and, with surtitles at performances, we see her acting skills, empathy and pathos).

The host for the festival is also Korean and we meet his wife who entertains the director and his driver to a meal.

Speaking of the driver, she is a young woman (perhaps many in the audience, like this reviewer, presupposing that the driver would be male). A condition of the festival is that guests must be chauffeured because of previous legal difficulties with an accident. The director, who suffers from glaucoma, loves his car of 15 years but entrusts himself to Misaki Watari, (Miura), a 23-year-old from the country, who gradually reveals her rather sad story. Gradually, Kafuku and the chauffeur become comfortable with each other, the director trusting the driver, the driver becoming more interested in his work, listening to the tapes during the travelling, being invited to watch rehearsals.

The film works well on the level of performances, emotional complexities, especially the director’s wariness of a young actor with whom his wife had previously been familiar. This leads to an unexpected crisis.

Not a spoiler, but happy to note that the film has two endings, bringing to a satisfying conclusion the Uncle Vanya theme as well as a covid-2020 sequence, reminding the audience that life does and must go on.