Desert of Namibia - Yoko Yamanaka
Yoko Yamanaka, who made a splash with her first low budget feature, Amiko (2017), when she was just 20, is at it again with her second feature, Desert of Namibia. This time, her protagonist is not a High School girl, but a wayward 21-year-old, bouncing from one boyfriend to another, having a hard time fitting into a rigid society, where things are in decline and there's no real prospect for the future, as a young zoomer woman.
Kana (Yuumi Kawai), a gazelle-like beauty, is first seen wondering around Tokyo, meeting a friend, who informs her about the suicide death of one of their friends. But she is distracted by other peoples' conversations spilling in her earshot.
The dissociation is a dominant feature in the film. One minute, Kana is happy and sunny, the next, she is moody and unresponsive. After leaving a live-in boyfriend in their tiny apartment, she moves in to another crammed one with Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko), an artist. Both men are enamored of her. Soon, though, she finds faults in the men and becomes volatile in her relationships.
There's a scene in which Kana takes a tumble on the stairs outside their apartment after a heated argument. She is briefly hospitalized with a neck brace. Kana's anger doesn't stop there, however.
Everyone tells her that she is free to do whatever she wants and the choices she makes in life are entirely hers. But it's as if she is watching her daily life (physically fighting with Hayashi) on her phone while on a treadmill -- which Yamanaka includes later, as a movie within a movie.
The general idea of survival and foreignness Kana feels is suggested in the film's title. With handheld camera work and long takes in tiny spaces, Yamanaka expertly captures the intimacy and suffocation that Kana feels.