A Far Shore 
遠いところ 「Tooi Tokoro」
Duration: 128 mins.
Director: Masaaki Kudo
Writer: Masaaki Kudo, Mami Suzuki (Screenplay),
Starring: Kotone Hanase, Yumemi Ishida, Yoshiro Sakuma, Izumi Matsuoka, Ayano Ogura, NENE, Yuusuke Takahashi, Shinsuke Kato, Shohei Uno, Shogen,
A Far Shore is Masaaki Kudo’s third feature film. An Okinawa-set social drama, it focusses on the fate of a teen mother who experiences a bitter coming of age in an uncaring society. Through her travails, Kudo exposes the low expectations and chances offered to young people, particularly women, in a prefecture that is treated as a holiday resort but has Japan’s highest unemployment rates, single-parent households, and lowest educational achievements.
These miserable circumstances are experienced through Aoi (Kotone Hanase) and Masaya (Yoshiro Sakuma), two 17-year-olds struggling to raise their son Kengo and hold on to their pokey, disorderly home in Koza, Okinawa. Young love (or maybe lust) has turned sour as Aoi, a girl always up for a good time, finds her work at a cabaret club too dicey to maintain as police crack down on underage hostesses. Meanwhile wastrel Masaya drifts drunkenly into unemployment and crime.
What transpires next is a variation on the Cathy Come Home (1966) storyline where a young family breaks apart under various incidents. As Aoi, trying to keep her family together, she bears the brunt of a list of degradations running from unemployment, domestic violence, and diving deeper into sex work, a vicious cycle she finds herself trapped in because of limited opportunities to better herself with only best friend Mio (Yumemi Ishida) for support.
At once, Aoi’s mounting struggles feel schematic for dramatic purposes and topicality but realistic as themes of money problems, an uncaring society, and male predation come in the shape of poor-paying work that makes Okinawa’s night-life the only way for a girl with no education to make a living, emotionally distant relatives and social services disregarding Aoi as an individual, and a hopeless Masaya. It works since it forms an all-consuming set of circumstances where one problem naturally feed into another. This results in a narrative current that drags the story to its bleak ending.
What sharpens Aoi’s tragedy is the sense of youth abandoned, broken, and left to fester.
Aoi and Masaya’s struggle to become adults is undercut by their character’s immature behaviour and it is frustrating to watch. A lack of forethought and applying assiduousness to their actions, conveys a lack of maturity as they struggle to fulfil adult responsibilities of work and paying bills and often resort to hedonistic reveries and teenage meltdowns. Their arrested development is underlined by how no adults in the film offer a good role model. Bad dads (played by veteran actors Shinsuke Kato and Shohei Uno) beat Masaya and abandon Aoi respectively while mother figures offer little to no guidance and the state looks on with indifference, save only to threaten Aoi’s position as mother. Thus, the reverberations of the older generation’s failings in offering guidance to these kids organically become the failings of the two teen parents whose actions reflect their neglected upbringing.
From this, the tragedy of the film becomes Aoi’s struggle to make life work and her growing instinct for motherhood emerging along with the threat of separation from Kengo and while inelegantly handled towards the end, when events pile up, the film looks good.
The words “bleak” and “despair” and the reference to Cathy Come Home, may make a reader think this is a gritty black-and-white social realist film but A Far Shore has a bright visual energy that comes from its setting and from costuming/make-up that offers a countervailing sense of Aoi’s life force asserting itself in bleak circumstances. It is her red dresses, lipstick, dyed hair, and underwear, the rosy cheeks and the blood that flows from her wounds as she tries to survive. With these, she stands out in environments where foliage overtakes streets and Okinawa’s famed beautiful beaches and seas host tourists and families experiencing she can only fleetingly grasp.
The familiar image of an imposing fence of a military base or the site of aircraft overhead is offered sparingly as this is less a story of international politics and militarism and more of Japan’s domestic politics, where kids are left trying to survive an indifferent society. In this vein, the focus is on their world so there are the dazzling lights of clubland reflecting on the windshield of the SUV that ferries Aoi from customer to customer and, in a standout sequence, a midnight police chase with best pal Mio where they scramble over walls and dash through alleys under neon lights. At one point, the film even seems to reference Shinji Somai’s Moving (1993) as Aoi encounters herself out in the water but without a moment of comfort, making this film provide a bitter counterpoint of a coming-of-age tale to that classic as A Far Shore insists on and succeeds in being a story of a girl’s survival in terrible conditions drawn from real life.
This is the third film from Masaaki Kudo and it made him the winner of the Pia Film Festival’s Oshima Prize 2024, the Japanese Movie Critics Award’s Best Newcomer, and the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award.
Head to SAKKA to stream A Far Shore from April 18th. It is available online worldwide (except for certain Asian territories). Stay tuned for my interview with director Kudo and to SAKKA’s social media feeds for more info on this film and other independent Japanese movies!