バグマティ リバー 「Bagumati Riba-」
Release Date: 2022
Duration: 29 mins.
Director: Yusaku Matsumoto
Writer: Yusaku Matsumoto, Kentaro Kishi (Screenplay),
Starring: Junko Abe, Kenji Kohashi, Man Bahadur Gurung, Akiko Kobayashi, Adam Torel,
Twitter: @kakifuraiyusaku
One of the most painful things about life is growing apart from people we are close to and then losing all connection. When the opportunity to grab a hold of something emerges, it should be taken even if the possibility of death stands in the way.
This is the situation that Natsuki (Junko Abe) finds herself in as she travels from Japan to Nepal in search of her brother Kenji (Kenji Kohashi). The last time she saw him was ten year’s ago when he left Japan to climb mountains. Two year’s ago he went missing during an aborted attempt to scale Mt. Everest. After Natsuki receives an anonymous postcard with a picture of Everest printed on the back, she is prompted to begin her own ascent in an effort to find some trace of him.
As a portrait of someone trying to recover a key family tie, this is powerful stuff as we watch Natsuki enter alien environments, leaving the urban Tokyo for the rustic Nepalese town of Lukla and then embarking up the foothills of Everest, a place where the overwhelming elements of the Earth are all around. Warnings from locals that such an undertaking is dangerous are met with her movingly plaintive grief-filled response of “I want to see him again.” It really strikes the heart strings as does the sight of her venturing into the unknown.
The environment is captured in magnificent atmospheric detail by DP Kentaro Kishi and director Matsumoto with an eye of expressing the sublime nature of the locations as they keep Natsuki at the centre of things. Close-ups and medium shots dominate urban environments like cafes and hostels but when she moves into the vast space of the mountains, it is medium shots and long shots of her heading towards mountains that she eventually disappears into. The sheer size of the terrain overwhelms her.
Junko Abe’s performance is really riveting as she moves with a sad desperation, the feeling of which provides the emotional drive for the film. Seeing her slip into the narrow streets of Lukla Town, it seems like she is folding her frame in on itself and speaks in a quiet voice to express her character’s timidity and so the physical exertion she goes through as she climbs and stumbles along perilous mountain paths is both heart-in-mouth stuff and moving in how she is driven by a conviction to find Kenji. The sound of her laboured breathing punctuates the constant whipping winds to get across how strenuous and potentially deadly her journey is and, thus, gets across the efforts she is making to find her brother.
These efforts hold a viewer through the story as the mountains and the image of Kenji exert an oneiric pull on Natsuki that takes her near death on her journey to find a loved one and overcome her grief at his loss. Appropriate symbolic imagery, dream sequences, and a key meeting with a Sherpa lead to the sight of the Bagmati River and its connection to Everest, from which its waters flow. This reminds Natsuki that life is constant and it is a cathartic moment of spirituality, one built up to organically and through Abe’s fantastic performance so that the emotions of her journey from grief to acceptance feel well-earned, powerful, and truly moving.
The genuine nature of the film comes from the fact that director Yusaku Matsumoto initially planned to make a documentary about Nobukazu Kuriki, a well-known mountain climber who tragically died during an attempt to scale Everest. Matsumoto had travelled to Nepal with his Kentaro Kishi, one of the leads in Matsumoto’s debut feature Noise, and also the magnificent The Sower, and also suffered altitude sickness and had to be taken to the hospital via an air ambulance and it feels as if these experiences come across in how realistic the film is. Other strong elements are the non-diegetic music of Ernst Reijseger’s string instruments and electronic humming, especially when coupled with time-lapse of racing clouds on the mountains to impart how powerful they are.