It's an exceedingly gentle film that captures a specific place, time and atmosphere. It's a city, in amongst all the bustling train lines, travelers and shoppers you'll find the gentle lives of backstreet people. Clearly summertime, the use of light and the sense of warmth, the thin clothing and gentle breezes make for a very contemplative experience that washes over you. A record of the pleasure of simple lives that's familiar but often forgotten, and a great way to evoke memories of such times in the viewer. Hou's film very recently recieved a better than I expected R1 USA release from Wellspring, coming with short interviews with the main players and a program broadcast on TV that serves as further insight into the production.
The story centers primarily on Yoko, a young writer currently researching a Taiwanese composer who largely grew-up and married into Japanese society in the early 20th century. No specifically about a journey to research any particular aspects of her work. In any way, her work is nothing more actual than another of the certain elements of her life intermingling with her friendship with Tadanobu Asano's character Hajime, and her ageing caring parents, her landlady, and the few peripheral characters.
Difficult to pin down the narrative beyond the few elements that would give away major plot points, the term 'major' sounds too definite for a film this subtle - it's about the gentility in the pleasures and not too apparent pains of life done in such a naturalistic way that it often borders on documentary for it's ability to persuade you these are actual events. Hou is fairly removed, fascinated in letting the characters find their own way both within the script and seemingly in improvisation too. The camera is often static, drifting from side to side when necessary.
A stunning sense of this being an accurate record of their lives, the society in which they're living, and the style and mood in which it all plays out is created over the course of the film. Yoko's relationship with her parents places the narrative in a modern, independently minded woman’s' society. Hajime's artistic interests and talents are a modern phenomena of such pursuits and views being at everyone’s fingertips. Their friendship brushes their lives gently against one another’s within the fairly anonymous city lifestyle, and Yoko's removed relationship with her parents makes their influence clearly that of adult to child, but one of breaking free and living differently, yet also evoking feelings of overlapping continuation of traditions.
Nothing feels contrived, though it is of course constructed very carefully to produce a film that's not necessarily an obvious pleasure to watch at first, but one which develops in the viewers mind, both constructed of their own lives and of the experience they've had when watching the film. Transported not only to another time and place, but so emotionally rich a representation that it serves as a reminder of the height of summer in a city which would be a please to return to. It forms it's own rules and structures if anything, seems to be a brief visit that doesn't need a true beginning or end, doesn't concern itself with pacing a narrative arch over the duration: instead works hard at the mood and atmosphere, the record it seems to intend to be.
Not a exercise in surface alone, the underlying details in the narrative are the depth which persuade me of it's richness, that on repeat viewings there's much more depth to be explored. On a December evening though, the dominant memory of the film, the experience most obvious to me today is that I was walking the streets with them, and sharing that time. Very rich, emotional experience - very touching.
As for the DVD (the recent R1 USA disc from Wellspring), briefly I would say this better than I expected having seen the DVDBeaver comparison with the Taiwanese disc : potentially a partial port of the japanese edition, coping with the gentility of the action, stammers when anything briefly gets beyond the general pace of the film.