折にふれて 「Ori ni furete」
Release Date: 2025
Duration: 81 mins.
Director: Hina Murata
Writer: Hina Murata (Screenplay)
Starring: Sakiko Honda, Saki Toyoyama, Shumpei Hosoi, Toshihiko Terada, Ryushi Mizukami,
Website Twitter: @orinifurete_
The Midnight Sun doubled as Hina Murata’s feature film debut and her graduation work from Kyoto University of the Arts. An assured drama, it went on to win Best Picture in the Japanese Feature Category at SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL 2024 and for good reason as Hina Murata explores the theme of the pain of separation through showing how main-character Fumi feels paradoxical love-hate emotions for her family. This is done through rich selection of motifs that play on presence and absence and contrasting her staid reality with an idealised fantasy world in which her feelings and pain are felt.
The film is set in Aramaki Town, Osaka Prefecture, during a sweltering July. The surroundings are everyday grey suburban sprawl that is reassuringly safe or stifling. For Fumi (Sakiko Honda), who is about to turn 20, it is both.
We follow her in the two weeks before her birthday in an atmosphere where the weather is close and days long. Fumi either spends time wrapping up personal affairs amidst the familiar streets dotted with stray cats and neighbours she knows, or at the home she shares with her overly-caring and ageing father (Ryushi Mizukami) and her older brother, a shut-in named Mutsuki (Shumpei Hosoi) aka Mucchan.
Her home life is the source of the film’s tension. Fumi’s father’s doting can come off as either protective or controlling. He is the opposite of those Yasujiro Ozu old men who sadly push their daughters out of the home. One might detect the loss of his wife, seen solely as a photo in a family altar, making him clingy. Meeting mortality will do that and at one point he muses about death to a cat but never to a daughter he wants to avoid worrying but Fumi is aware of his advanced years as an aunt reminds her.
Meanwhile, an absent brother, once interested in astronomy, is remembered by former friends Fumi runs into, the visual motif of stars or the sound of a door knocking and a futon being beaten. Fumi glimpses him but her interactions are mostly her diligently trying to take care of Mucchan by delivering meals to his bedroom door and forlornly trying to get her father to acknowledge his son as their time together winds down.
Running through these scenes are news reports of a baby whale, affectionately named Arachan, that is stuck navigating a nearby river as it tries to escape to the sea. Maybe this is a metaphor for Fumi whose days pass by fitfully. There are also diary extracts narrated by her, each one describing days slipping away in the grip of a malaise and frustrated ambitions and the desire to escape. It could describe Fumi’s state of mind giving into frustration over her surroundings but, as details of Mucchan are parcelled out, it could be his diary and hint at his despair at being stuck. As this idea creeped into my mind, it was hard not to feel pity for both and sense the full extent of Fumi’s worry for her sibling.
These rich details accumulate as Fumi’s day of departure comes closer and it all feels choking. It is understandable that she feels irritation with family but one may detect a sense of shame she feels that she will leave them behind.
These emotions organically find outlets in arguments with her father and fantastical visuals of Fumi’s dreams of a seaside town where the sun never sets. This fantasy world plot device is certainly eye-catching. For most of the film, Hina Murata uses a narrow aspect ratio and an urban grey for Fumi’s surroundings to indicate how she feels trapped and, as the screen’s aspect ratio changes from narrow to wide, the colour saturation and hues are upped to supercharge the screen with a heightened enjoyable energy of summer and freedom. Mucchan is there, only in the form of a girl (Saki Toyoyama) the same age as Fumi and together and they go on adventures filled with shaved ice and somen noodles, seaside ephemera and sibling memories. It is here that the film is at its most open and earnest as the characters engage directly with themes of leaving each other behind. The dialogue’s earnestness creates pathos and it feels all the more poignant when it is couched in the ideal fantasy world Fumi has created while time ticks away in the real world.
These contrasts in the fantasy where one can speak plainly to family and the painful reality that honest speech is held back by shame and wanting to avoid a sense of sorrow that comes from saying goodbye allow this film to become exquisitely heart-breaking. The earnest dialogue catches that sad sense of distance that can develop between family: we are meant to be close but, at some point, we go our own separate ways. The film does end on a hopeful note that reminded me of Satoko Yokohama’s Ito (2021) with its simple gesture of a wave exchanged with someone precious. It’s execution with Arachan and Fumi’s movement left me in tears after the film had me contemplating the sadness of these characters saying goodbye for so long.
The Midnight Sun was screened on March 13 at Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka.