親密な他人 「Shinmitsuna tanin」
Release Date: March 05th, 2022
Duration: 96 mins.
Director: Mayu Nakamura
Writer: Mayu Nakamura (Script/Story),
Starring: Asuka Kurosawa, Fuju Kamio, Yu Uemura, Shogen, Shiro Sano, Mitsuko Oka,
Thursday Jul 21, 7:00pm
Director Mayu Nakamura will attend the screening.
Mayu Nakamura is an award-winning documentarian and fiction filmmaker. Her recent works includes Alone Again in Fukushima, the post Fukushima meltdown study of a man who stayed behind to look after animals, and Covid-19 short film Among Four of Us (interview with director Mayu Nakamura about that film). She returns to the screens with Intimate Stranger, a psycho-sexual thriller short on story surprises but deep in social critique and wonderfully heavy on eerie atmosphere. Nakamura works well with her cast as she channels a magnificent performance by criminally under-utilised lead actress Asuka Kurosawa.
Somewhere in Tokyo is Megumi Ishikawa (Asuka Kurosawa) a 46-year-old part-time salesperson at a baby clothing store. Her routine boils down to going to work and returning home where she has been waiting for her son, Shinpei (Yu Uemura), who went missing a year ago. When a cash-strapped 20-year-old young man named Yuji (Fuju Kamio) claims to know Shinpei’s whereabouts, Megumi invites him to stay with her. The audience knows that Yuji isn’t entirely on the level since, at the start of the film, we see him perform an “ore-ore” scam and fleece an old lady out of her money for a criminal gang led by Kenichi (Shogen) and it looks like Megumi might be his next target.
As we wait and watch what happens between the two, Megumi’s behaviour starts to become inconsistent. The close proximity of Yuji and Megumi to each other tantalisingly reveals hidden secrets and they develop a strange sort of intimacy that gets us to question reality. Their relationship becomes one that sometimes seems like a parent and child and other times seems sexual and we in the audience get caught up in an ever-shifting game of trying to guess who is predator and who is prey and who will come out on top.
Waiting for the results is never boring. The atmosphere to this one is part of its major selling point as Nakamura utilises our Covid reality to craft a lifeless world, one where human intimacy, even energy, is limited. It is visually delivered via the static shots and washed-out look, streets scenes that lack pedestrians and liveliness, and through costuming like the consistent use of face masks. This lack of warmth also comes through in the film’s soundscape where silence is predominant and it is only the voices of the main players that can be heard or the haunting score and weird musical tones in increasingly disturbing dream sequences involving Megumi and the young men in her life.
The face masks hide some of the intent of each character but their eyes, still visible and signalling emotional shifts, hint at what is going on. It only comes out in the second part of the film as Nakamura restricts most of the action to Megumi’s flat, a place that becomes claustrophobic as we get into the weird intimate space of the two co-habitants and their psychodrama takes a hold of the narrative.
Dream narratives, flashbacks, a painting in Megumi’s room, and the menacing sight of a straight razor hint at so much to keep us invested in a storyline building up tension. As intensely personal as it gets, however, Nakamura interestingly links it into a wider story of the economic damage wrought by Covid that pushes two lost souls together for a resolution that is ghoulish.
This is where we get to the best part of the film as Nakamura keeps Asuka Kurosawa front and centre of the screen. Kurosawa, in her most complex role since A Snake in June (2002), essays a vulnerable woman well but allows glints of a cold and calculating nature that sets up a twist in the film. While audiences might be able to guess the direction the story takes, we are driven to keep viewing by her absorbing acting.
Nakamura, with a particular intent on breaking the taboo in the Japanese entertainment by having a woman in her 40s be sensual on screen, emphasises Kurosawa’s physical performance through use of camera close-ups and extreme close-ups on her body and face. Lingering shots are given to scenes where Kurosawa traces her hands over her body, licks lips covered in red – the strongest colour in the film – and eyes the men who wolfishly surround her. At time she may look like a waif, but she also looks like a wolf to keep us wondering about her intent. The camera’s close presence shows a skilled actress peeling back layers of her character so that really get the chance to question her motivations.
Nakamura works well to place Kurosawa and Kamio in scenes together where their intimate spaces get entangled as their psychological journeys mesh and it culminates in a long take where the two go all out and lay the story out on the table. More intriguingly, behind all of that lays a critique of Japanese society as Nakamura uses Megumi to criticise the way men are coddled, especially by mothers. The clingy mother-son relationship we see on screen has a chilling and satisfying ending that plays perfectly with this notion to add an intellectually stimulating ending to match the emotional ride we have been taken on.