わたしの見ている世界が全て 「Watashi no Miteiru Sekai ga Subete」
Release Date: March 31st, 2023
Duration: 82 mins.
Director: Keitaro Sakon
Writer: Keitaro Sakon, Harumi Uraki (Screenplay),
Starring: Kokoro Morita, Eriko Nakamura, Yoshihiro Kumano, Haya Nakazaki, Yuya Matsuura, Yota Kawase, Haruna Hori, Shinsuke Kato,
Lonely Glory is a quiet drama with a sociological bite to it. This review reveals things but it is a circular narrative so the end result is known. The pleasure is in the journey and awkward emotions it evokes.
The sophomore theatrical feature of Keitaro Sakon following Tokyo Butterfly (2020), both films were made at Tokyo New Cinema – the outfit behind Ryutaro Nakagawa’s Summer Blooms (2017), Plastic Love Story (2013), Mio on the Shore (2019) – and both films ask audiences to reckon with loss.
Ostensibly the story of a family fragmenting, the setting and behaviour of the characters allude to wider issues in Japan with regard to the tension between individualism and familism/communitarianism. As these issues emerge through the family infighting, the film gains an extra strength through earned poignancy.
The sense of loss comes through quite profoundly due to Kokoro Morita providing another performance that marks her as a talent to watch.
The engine of the story is Haruka Kumano (Kokoro Morita), a fiercely driven individual. She is the sort to map out her goals, motor towards them relentlessly, and run over anyone who gets in her way. She has a ruthless single-mindedness, an attitude that gets her kicked out of the counselling service she set up in downtown Tokyo due to power harassment. Looking to make some quick cash to found a new start-up, she decamps to the outskirts of the city to make her estranged siblings vacate and sell the family-run food centre. She wastes no time in initiating her “Family Independence Plan”, a campaign to drive them out of the house by fixing each person up in a situation she regards as ideal.
What ensues is a quiet and beguiling series of reunions and partings set in the suburbs where the slow rhythm of life and an ageing population forms the backdrop of characters working their way through the various dysfunctions of adult relationships that have stranded them in their family home, all while Haruka’s pestering rings in their ears to add some spicey low-key comedy.
An older brother (Yoshihiro Kumano) courting a farmer’s daughter, a divorced older sister (Eriko Nakamura) in a tentative relationship with a new suitor, a NEET younger brother (Haya Nakazaki) still searching for himself a few years after graduating from university. Each sibling could be an archetype but they escape such a label because the actors imbue their characters with a sympathetic awkwardness that humanises them – a lack of confidence means a lack of eye contact, a lack of drive leads to sluggish acting out of procrastination, a lack of direction has actors flop about. Their tentative striving for something better is made more relatable not least because of the petty resentments they feel towards their recently returned errant sister who is their less-than-sensitive polar opposite.
Kokoro Morita, so powerful as an earnest and desperately hopeful theatre actor in Ice Cream and the Sound of Rain Drops (2018), is inspired in her role as Haruka. A miniature Robespierre in a skirt offering revolution to hopeless people stuck in some sort of arrested development, she is initially entertaining to watch as she exudes barely contained energy – and contempt – while rushing around “fixing things”. There is some humour in the audaciousness of her big-city blunt attitude, some respect for her intelligence, but in every scene Morita absolutely nails the cynicism and self-absorbedness of her character with sardonic delivery of lines and a face that flares up with indignation when she does not get her way. Cruel critiques of the “commonplace” people around her are common and her obstinance mean any admiration fades away as her selfish attitude overwhelms others.
Without moralising a message to the audience too much, Sakon’s screenplay uses the the contrast in characters to make a viewer think about the individual, as driven by crass capitalistic attitude, as opposed to the community. This is evinced by the damage wrought by Haruka’s single-minded behaviour. It feels thoughtless and like a grotesque approximation of entrepreneurship, her actions like that of a petulant child, offensive and, considering her background, one senses a critique of extreme capitalism/individualism through her.
Central to this feeling is the film’s oft-returned to location of the down-at-heel food centre where Haruka washes up, where her family have gone for refuge, and where an increasingly dwindling clientele of elderly customers still appear and evidently take succour in the fraying bonds the place still yields. While the economic status of the place is in peril, as Haruka astutely points out, Sakon spends a lot of time patiently showing the life of the place so that this location speaks to a lot of warm-hearted history. Thus the disregard everything is held in by Haruka should leave a viewer feeling dismay. It definitely echoes the way big business tends to pillage public goods and communities. When such things are gone there is often nothing to replace it and the film achieves this message with quite a poignant sense of emptiness that sweeps over the location as Haruka stands in a place where once there were chairs, tables, customers, beds, TVs. The way her siblings reconstitute their lives with a new definition of the motif of family while Haruka tears it all down and is left isolated also hammers this point home. She may get her way but her singlemindedness leaves her ironically isolated in ways that her siblings aren’t as they become part of a wider community, hence the film’s apt title of Lonely Glory.
Again, Morita is perfect. Whenever Haruka becomes more uncertain, when someone pulls her up on her attitude, Morita shows a childlike vulnerability and it comes out in the finale which should leave a viewer with a little of the sense of disappointment that she feels. It is a stunning fall from grace from her high of absolute confidence and it comes, rather convincingly, from her being so self-absorbed that she fails to notice the people around her until she stands alone and then, she has lost and that feeling undergirds the critique of individualism and drives home a sense of failure that emerges from amidst the light humour and solid family drama with substance to it.
Lonely Glory plays as part of the Japan Film Festival + 2023 season.