波紋 「Hamon」
Duration: 120 mins.
Director: Naoko Ogigami
Writer: Naoko Ogigami (Screenplay),
Starring: Mariko Tsutsui, Ken Mitsuishi, Hayato Isomura, Hana Kino, Erina Tsuda, Tamae Ando, Noriko Eguchi, Akira Emoto, Midoriko Kimura,
The feeling of resentment can poison a person and their negativity can ripple out to affect others. This dynamic powers Ripples, a blackly-comic drama from Naoko Ogigami (Rent-a-Cat, Close-Knit) where a middle-class Tokyo family falls apart because they are unable to work out that feeling until it is too late.
The person feeling the most resentment is a put-upon housewife named Yoriko Sudo (Mariko Tsutsui) who, in the film’s opening scenes, we see go through daily routines unappreciated by a family who coast about her on the periphery. They consist of her lifeless salaryman husband Osamu (Ken Mitsuishi), layabout teenage son Takuya (Hayato Isomura) and a lecherous father-in-law who, cancer-stricken and bedbound though he may be, tries to grope her while she nurses him.
In a subtle eye-pull performance from Mariko Tsutsui, the extent of Yoriko’s resentment ripples vividly via a harsh grimace of gritted teeth, a furrowed brow that flashes fury, and terse sentences suggestive of inner strive. The drip-drip release of resentment also comes from brusque movements she uses when doling out the family meal – and in a cruelly funny moment, while the family half-heartedly talk about the news of the Fukushima powerplant melting down and people fleeing Tokyo, using potentially irradiated water for her father in law’s food.
While the camera focusses our attention on Yoriko, we also notice how none of her family really looks at her and the only source of conversation is disaster in relation to news reports of the Fukushima meltdown, letting us know that it is March 11th, 2011 at the start of the film while also makes a thematic link between/foreshadowing the building pressure and eventual meltdown of Yoriko. She finally vents her anger when the faithless Osamu disappears out in the garden to water plants and then disappears altogether without a word which leaves her tearing up flowers.
Fast-forward ten years later and Osamu returns to their suburban home, looking the worse for wear and seeking help for cancer. Osamu finds his father has died in his absence and his son Takuya gone, having gone to university all the way down in Kyushu and stayed there for work. Meanwhile, a now menopausal Yoriko splits her time between a part-time job at a stare and a cult that sells her water they claim cleanses her soul of anger. Also, his flower garden has been replaced by a zen/dry garden (Karesansui) in which Yoriko rakes the gravel stones to achieve inner peace when made angry, an emotion which comes back in waves for her as Osamu tries to reassert himself and disrupt her new life after she agrees to care for him.
Tension builds as she has clearly moved on and he tries to move in but a co-worker and new-found friend named Mizuki (Hana Kino) gives Yoriko hyper-aggressive samurai battle-themed advice about getting even and the wily Yoriko starts to have fun by stating her care comes with a proviso: he joins her cult. Finally, she has a way of making Osamu acknowledge in front of everyone her self-sacrifice on his behalf…
With this setup, the film could turn into a simple comedy where a put-upon woman gets even with the world. There are gloriously funny petty comebacks and humiliations meted out by Yoriko to her no-good husband and rude customers at her store, and laughter to be had with Yoriko submitting to bizarre cult behaviour like awkward dancing and proselytizing to a sceptical Osamu. However, Ogigami’s screenplay gains a deeper humanism as she fleshes out her characters by showing how, while they their lack of appreciation makes them at fault for this sordid story, they react in a logical, if in a selfish way to Yoriko as the true extent of her cruelty comes out when Takuya brings his deaf girlfriend Tamami (Erina Tsuda) home unannounced and it is a breathtakingly awkward moment where we see someone we would think we should cheer for become truly unhinged.
In the film’s early scenes we see that, having been ignored she has become resentful but as we witness in the film, Yoriko’s resentment makes it hard to live with her and pushes other people away. It is quite a turn but we spend an entire film seeing how she is capable of being a nasty and conceited character when it suits her as she delights in punishing others and loves the adulation of cult praising her care for Osamu and when she is forced to confront this aspect of herself, the film gains more moral traction as successive slidings of humiliations and recriminations go by and the film pivots into poignancy when she looks to her confidante Mizuki and sees a fellow mother whose family has been struck by fate differently and so she begins to reassess her own actions, especially with Osamu’s condition.
Ogigami gives grace to her side characters, allowing them to explain themselves in the midst of their spats, especially as Takuya underlines why he left home. For Osamu, that selfish man, initially a figure of fun and foolishness, becomes a tiny bit sympathetic. He ends up having the most perceptive line in the film when talking about emotions and resentment that links cleverly with Yoriko’s dry garden, stating that with the art of Karesansui, even though there appears to be no water on the surface, its presence is there, you just need to look, something the family were guilty of not doing when it came to Yoriko. By the end of the film, that applies to all of the characters. Hence the meaning of title Ripples grows. Through it all is Mariko Tsutsui, one of Japan’s best performers, who Ogigami uses perfectly to get a wide range of emotions from. We know she can be unhinged like in Jam and subdued like in Harmonium but emotions always run deep and they come out here in so many shades.
The screenplay is just a masterclass of character building with every character having a backstory and the web of relationships vibrating with emotions that are mined for humour and more profound meaning. Anyone who has been in a family will recognise moments of being taken for granted and the fallout from that makes for great drama and comedy here. This is also a very cinematic film as the screen is rich with visual motifs relating to water and hidden feelings. Osamu’s journey begins and ends with water, specifically a hosepipe trickling it but also the toxicity of irradiated water from Fukushima and his scepticism to the cult water. For Yoriko, there is the zen garden whose gravel she rakes into waves to a CG pond-landscape where the emotions radiate on the surface as character engage in the occasional battle of will to dominate each other with feelings of shame and resentment to the emotional release when a sun shower hits Yoriko as she learns to unburden herself.
Thus, the film operates as a ruthlessly funny social satire powered by a heartfelt drama of a woman taken for granted finally biting back through a stellar turn by Mariko Tsutsui. It is one of my favourite films of the year and I recommend it.
Ripples played at Nippon Connection 2024 on May 31st and June 01st.
The festival ran from May 28 to June 02. You can read more about the festival’s programme in an early preview and a fuller overview.
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