dir: Kore-Eda Hirokazu
Kore-Eda Hirokazu is one of the best Japanese filmmakers working today. Best known for Maborosi and After Life, Hirokazu’s films focus on loss, memory, and how we define ourselves. His newest film Nobody Knows is currently making its way around the U.S. in selected cities. I have not had the pleasure of watching that film, but recently, thanks to my all region DVD player, I was able to view the unknown (in the U.S. anyway) film he made between After Life and Nobody Knows, a film called Distance. This film was never released in the U.S. and the critical word from festivals was mostly negative. I believe Distance is worthy of the praise of his other films.
In 1995 a religious cult released sarin nerve gas into a Tokyo subway. Some may remember the pictures on the news of the police in masks and the strange looking, long haired cult leader. For many of us Westerners, the images faded quickly. We have had our Jim Jones, our David Koreish; this was just one more from somewhere far off.
Distance does not deal directly with the subway incident, but the real life tragedy hangs over every frame. The film is set three years after a religious cult has poisoned Tokyo’s water supply, causing one hundred and twenty-eight deaths. Since then, four people have met every year. The government sponsors mourning sites at the water supply plants for survivors and family and friends of the deceased. These four do not go there. They can’t. They are the relatives not of the victims, but of the murderers. Instead the four go into the woods, back to the lakeside that was once the home of the cult.
On this day, two strange occurrences happen. Their vehicle is stolen many miles from civilization and there is a fifth person at the site, one of the surviving cult members, someone who remembers all of their relatives. The tension is high between the five at first, but with nothing else to do, they all walk to the old house that belonged to the cult. The five have to spend an uneasy night together, remembering their loved ones, wrestling with demons from the past, and asking questions for which there are no satisfying answers. Hirokazu films all this with handheld cameras, a limited crew, and a semi-improvised script. The result is an immediacy that is hard to ignore. Out of abounding silences, a gesture of grief here, a philosophical debate there, and lyrically filmed flashbacks, Hirokazu renders the tragedy far more effectively than could be done in millions of dollars of special effects and extras. The question is how does one go on? The answer for most of these characters is not very easily.
Towards the ending, seemingly out of nowhere, a mystery develops. It is not the mystery one would expect (what happened to the vehicle). Instead, this is a mystery about motives, a mystery which Hirokazu refuses to solve. There are clues that can be deciphered and one knows that the mystery ties in with the nature of grief, but that is as far as the director will go in explanation. Instead of being a hindrance, this ambiguity heightens the ending, which resolves little, but resolution is not so easy for these characters.
Some have been annoyed by all of the ambiguity and shots of characters sitting alone in silence. The film asks the viewer to be patient, to go on the journey with its characters. Some have argued that the journey was not worth taking. I believe this is a film that rewards the viewer’s efforts in its complete honesty and moving final half-hour. With Nobody Knows currently playing the art theater circuit and presumably to eventually be released on video, please someone give an American release to Distance.