"Yamabuki", by Japanese director-writer Juichiro Yamasaki, is both a highly personal and disconcerting work, at once hyper-realistic (filming took place in and around Minawa, which Yamasaki knows like the back of his hand, as this is where he lives) and totally internalized, even dreamlike (the action unfolds more through the prism of the characters' feelings than from an outside perspective). It's also a story that's both very well-crafted (the lives of the two main characters are presented in a fragmented way at the start, until their paths become credibly intertwined) and very threadbare (we know too little about the characters, their pasts and their daily lives not to be occasionally lost).
Another paradox is that, on the one hand, the film manages to make us feel close to the character of the Korean emigrant Chang-su, but on the other, it leaves us impervious to the distress of the high-school student Yamabuki, withdrawn as she is into her attitude of coldness and hostility towards anyone, including her young lover.
The same goes for the tone (Changsu confronts his difficulties in an overly maudlin manner, while Yamabuki pulls a long face from the first to the last minute), for the symbolism (light-hearted when it likens the girl's first name to that of a mountain flower, conventional when it comes to cherry blossoms, heavy-handed in the sequence when Yamabuki's police officer father starts making incomprehensible esoteric remarks).
The same can be said of the themes addressed: the quest for identity, emancipation, state authority, the blended family, political commitment, economic and social precariousness, mourning, xenophobia. They are certainly interesting, but there are too many to fill the 97-minute screening time, and as a result insufficiently in-depth.
Be that as it may, this film is well worth seeing, for all its defects and despite its austere appearance (grainy 16 mm film, mostly cold colors). Above all, it takes an uncompromising look at modern-day Japan. And Hang Yoon-soo, the Korean actor, is to be commended for his total commitment to the character of the down-on-his-luck emigrant. The musical accompaniment by Olivier Deparis is equally remarkable, with its music-box-like tinkling, lightening the overall heaviness of the atmosphere. There are also some lovely scenes at the beginning, when everything is still going well for Chang-su when it comes to his job as a machine operator, to the solidarity between the quarry workers and to the harmonious family trio he forms with his Japanese partner and their little girl: the three-way cuddling sequence is particularly touching.
The day Juichiro Yamasaki shows himself less solemn, less "philosophical" - in a word, less serious - he will manage to produce more balanced, less dolorous works, closer to real life, where smiles sometimes pierce the leaden blanket of misfortune. And why not, masterpieces.
