Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter Structurally inventive, Kusano's daring cinema implements ‘distantiation’ effects to get to the heart of friendship issues at times when life has settled. While the repetitions convey the suffocation of role patterns in both friendship and family, a line left out or added in unsettles and reminds us life can take unexpected turns.
You can eliminate words only when you've shared experience
I felt the door to "our kingdom".. I had to eliminate the girl. She is not you.
Hanoka didn't respond to the song that Aki sang, this broke the illusion that Aki built upon this girl -- a sosi of Naoko. The girl is not Naoko, this child is the obstacle that prevent Naoko to go to the Kingdom that Aki and Naoko once built. But Aki is paradoxical. She said that the life of Naoko is the eye of the typhoon, it will become very agitated in the future. She also said that the kingdom where Naoko dwells in is impaired to her.
I saw through the character of Aki, some pure and strong power. She truely believes in the friendship that she weaves with Naoko. She felt the strong sense of self-protection of Naoko's husband, she is not conformist to the traditional family model. She cannot fit in into the society, and she thinks Naoko is also not the kind of person who can fit it an established, self-protective, rigid model. She considers their kingdom which made with "chairs and sheets" (-- maybe here refers to school, a place where people will keep on learning and growing) as the kingdom of ultimate freedom.
She said she didn't know why, she just chose to push to girl into the muddy stream. The gril slipped, and she pushed her. This description of an murderous act reminds me the description of murder written in Stranger by Albert Camus.
Then, the strong sense of righterousness, the willing to save her dear one from drowning into a model which seems to be crooked in her eyes reminds me the murder in A bright summer day. It seems the protagonists in both of the film is out of her and his mind, that they killed someone because they imposed their value as the ultimate truth. On the other hand, I felt touched by this sort of stuborness. "A child has unrestrained emotion. A small things to an adult is overwhelming for them." It seems the moment that they committed the murder is a moment that they can hold their childhood while being adults. They are expressing something pure emotional regardless the moral restrction that a mature human would always keep in their head.
I like the way how the direction decomposed the rehearsal, and the narrative of the story is unchronological until the very end. The chair of Hanoka reminds absent, while actors keep on interacting with it. Through different processes of researsal, I felt as an audience to access to some pure emotions as I appraoch infinitely closer to the truth. I felt this emotion that has carried in both of the character (which lives invisiblely, refers to Luigi Pirandello's work), and the actors (when I saw "Aki"'s eyes full of bloodshots). I saw the sky turning dark from the window behind Aki, so I know they have been rehearsing for the whole day, with or without the decorations
I feel touched by these fragmental moments of rehearsal, and the effort to construct and de-construct a story -- a kingdom.
You can eliminate words only when you've shared experience
I felt the door to "our kingdom".. I had to eliminate the girl. She is not you.
Hanoka didn't respond to the song that Aki sang, this broke the illusion that Aki built upon this girl -- a sosi of Naoko. The girl is not Naoko, this child is the obstacle that prevent Naoko to go to the Kingdom that Aki and Naoko once built. But Aki is paradoxical. She said that the life of Naoko is the eye of the typhoon, it will become very agitated in the future. She also said that the kingdom where Naoko dwells in is impaired to her.
I saw through the character of Aki, some pure and strong power. She truely believes in the friendship that she weaves with Naoko. She felt the strong sense of self-protection of Naoko's husband, she is not conformist to the traditional family model. She cannot fit in into the society, and she thinks Naoko is also not the kind of person who can fit it an established, self-protective, rigid model. She considers their kingdom which made with "chairs and sheets" (-- maybe here refers to school, a place where people will keep on learning and growing) as the kingdom of ultimate freedom.
She said she didn't know why, she just chose to push to girl into the muddy stream. The gril slipped, and she pushed her. This description of an murderous act reminds me the description of murder written in Stranger by Albert Camus.
Then, the strong sense of righterousness, the willing to save her dear one from drowning into a model which seems to be crooked in her eyes reminds me the murder in A bright summer day. It seems the protagonists in both of the film is out of her and his mind, that they killed someone because they imposed their value as the ultimate truth. On the other hand, I felt touched by this sort of stuborness. "A child has unrestrained emotion. A small things to an adult is overwhelming for them." It seems the moment that they committed the murder is a moment that they can hold their childhood while being adults. They are expressing something pure emotional regardless the moral restrction that a mature human would always keep in their head.
I like the way how the direction decomposed the rehearsal, and the narrative of the story is unchronological until the very end. The chair of Hanoka reminds absent, while actors keep on interacting with it. Through different processes of researsal, I felt as an audience to access to some pure emotions as I appraoch infinitely closer to the truth. I felt this emotion that has carried in both of the character (which lives invisiblely, refers to Luigi Pirandello's work), and the actors (when I saw "Aki"'s eyes full of bloodshots). I saw the sky turning dark from the window behind Aki, so I know they have been rehearsing for the whole day, with or without the decorations
I feel touched by these fragmental moments of rehearsal, and the effort to construct and de-construct a story -- a kingdom.