Release Date: April 01st, 2025
Duration: 94 mins.
Director: Daisuke Miyazaki
Writer: Santa Ikegami (Screenplay),
Starring: Hina Kikuchi (Maria), Masataka Fujishige (Kanata), Sahel Rosa (Kyoko), Mayuki (Hana), Ryuji Sato, Tomoko Fujita (Grandmother),
Twitter: @Mcinema_MMJ
V. Maria made me feel old, which is not a pleasant feeling.
It is a coming-of-age film that features the faded rock subgenre of Visual Kei as its backdrop. It was huge (as in global) when I was a young teen, thus there were times in the film where I had a sad feeling that my own youth had faded, much like the music’s prominence.
Then I got over myself, realised this was part of the film’s intention, rode that melancholy feeling and loved the ending.
Spoilers ahead.
It begins with K-pop-influenced high schooler Maria (Hina Kikuchi) living with her grandmother (Tomoko Fujita) and rooting through the belongings of her recently-deceased mother, Seiko (Rino Oshima). She unearths a pile of pristine Visual Kei music magazines, CDs, and a red jacket with the word GUILTY emblazoned on its back. After Maria marvels at the flamboyant dress, hairstyles, and androgynous looks of various bands, she discovers a diary and a cassette tape with V. Maria written on it. Inside is a photograph of her mother standing with a mysterious man.
Despite having lived in a single-parent household, Maria and her mother weren’t close. Thus, seeking to understand the woman who raised her (and maybe where she came from), the girl gets together with a more music-savvy schoolmate named Hana (Mayuki) and, with her mother’s diary in hand, dives head-first into Visual Kei while searching for people who knew Seiko and her connection to GUILTY.
From here, we get youth movie that works because of a convincing portrait of a digital native dusting off analogue dreams from a once-huge musical genre. As Maria goes from YouTube to small record stores, attends live house performances, watches VHS tapes, and reads CD jackets in order to immerse herself in the music her mother adored, a love story akin to John Lennon and Yoko Ono is teased out from the Visual Kei veteran giving her a crash-course in the culture. This is where I began to feel old.
As Maria excavates what is ancient history for her, I saw my own youth spent poring over Japan-related magazines, TV programmes, and websites and listening to rock (although I was more into Shibuya-kei). I identified with her sense of curiosity but when she talked to older characters about memories of her mother, I suddenly found that I related to them a lot more. Specifically, the poignancy in their reminiscences resonated with me. This came about when ex-GUILTY band members, now middle-aged men, looked back at their make-up adorned youthful faces and ruefully quipped, “time is cruel” and when Kyoko (Sahel Rosa), a long-time Bangya (a band girl who worships Visual Kei bands) laments with a tinge of loneliness the loss of friends from the scene as they stop attending concerts and start families. I felt that same passage of time and the absence of people and this formed a strong undercurrent that leant the film a greater meaning.
In exploring the contrast between their youthful selves in flashbacks and their present-tense middle-aged selves, this youth film becomes just affecting as a portrait of people out of time and this sense of disjointedness applies to Seiko whose absence haunts everyone.
This sounds like miserable viewing but, in a perfect balance with its young protagonist, the film filled me with a sense of guardianship.
As an audience to Maria’s story, I could relate to her but felt closer to the perspective of the adults she encounters and whose stories add meaning to her world. Thus, relating to them as I did, I felt like I was watching over Maria with care much like them. This sense was cemented by the naturalistic acting of Hina Kikuchi who held my sympathy as she conveyed a quiet pluckiness and a little vulnerability in her journey. An easy to miss scene of the grandmother tucking Maria into bed emphasises a sense that this girl is innocent, curious, and growing and we are seeing her being guided and it is moving to view.
Her growth works especially well with the screenplay structure having Maria’s journey punctuated by narrated excerpts from Seiko’s diary. This acts as an effective emotional bridge between past and present as the experiences of mother and daughter kind of resonate. It also shows how Maria is able to model new behaviour and understanding of the world through the people, places and music that influence her.
Director Daisuke Miyazaki’s cinematic presentation of Maria’s journey is always stellar. Miyazaki adopts a lot of medium shots for concerts and conversations and mixes in wides to situate Maria in her suburban hometown setting, split screen for style, CCTV views, and changing aspect ratios and screen texture for flashbacks. There is often a fluid camera which can pan around to uncover new characters entering a scene or dolly through locations. It is unobtrusively done and enjoyable to watch.
Lighting is also fantastic, particularly a scene where Maria watches a VHS tape and is lit by the glow of an old news report featuring her mother. The lights slowly dim around her and the camera cuts from a shot of her is profile to head on as it slowly zooms in on her face mesmerised and showing delight. The sound design in the storytelling scenes is similarly excellent as music can be heard faintly, somewhat distorted, like an echo from the past.
SPOILERS
The film ends with two knockout performances with beautifully composed music by SUGIZO of the band Luna Sea and fronted by musician Masataka Fujishige who plays GUILTY’s ex-lead singer Kanata. The man has Hyde-like dulcet tones that capture the burning romance of the songs. Miyazaki presents the show with plenty of pizzazz to show some of the genre’s style but he never forgets the beating heart of the film which is the connections formed between Maria and the older people she meets. His deployment of close-ups to highlight sight lines between Maria and others allows for exquisite exchanges of emotional energies as the mystery of V. Maria is solved.
It is here that age proves crucial as the lyrics of the film’s theme song carry the emotional freight of bonds between people that were made decades ago and will never be forgotten and that moved my heart a lot. Furthermore, as these bonds are conveyed to Maria, it creates a sense that a circle between a daughter and mother has been closed and I found myself shedding tears.
END OF SPOILERS
The overall film is so classily put together and I was immensely moved by how emotionally satisfying it was to see the themes of the film and characters old and young brought together but I was bowled over by how the song at the live house segued into the subdued version in the credits. Just genius.
V. Maria fits a familiar Daisuke Miyazaki formula of being music-themed and female fronted but it features an equal amount of older adults whose memories and flashbacks to their youthful days form a significant chunk of narrative and it is really moving. In that spirit, I really liked that the film captures a sense of a now-esoteric world with its own unique dialect and concert etiquette that lives on in the hearts of fans and just waits to be discovered by a new generation.
V. Maria was screened on March 17 at Theatre Umeda Cinema 4. It will be screened again on Wednesday March 19, at 21:00 at Theatre Umeda Cinema 4.
If you made it down this far, thanks for reading. Here are some great songs: