Summary
If you lost your phone (and friend) on holiday, would you discover a new way of examining the world, or crumple into a heap?
Following its festival premiere at the Osaka Asian Film Festival earlier this year, Daisuke Miyazaki’s follow-up to Yamato (California) was first presented as “Specters and Tourists” exhibition by the ArtScience Museum and Singapore International Film Festival in Singapore last year. It’s as experimental a piece as its presentation would imply, and recreates the terrifying joy of getting lost in another country.
Nina (Nina Endo) wins some free airline tickets, and decides to take a break from her workaday existence by travelling to Singapore with her friend Su (Sumire). After finding malaise in the regular tourist traps, and falling back on familiar shopping malls, Nina loses both Su and her smartphone.
If TOURISM seems listless, it’s because it’s tapped into the general sense of ‘whatever’ that comes with a directionless life. Prior to their trip, Nina, Su, and several of their friends speak directly to camera about their casual jobs in supermarkets and cafes. From what we see of their schedule, it mostly involves sitting around, smoking, and discussing the finer points of hummus. After a few days of tourism, which does showcase some of the rad sights of the city, they conclude “It’s just like Japan.”
The film shifts stylistically and narratively when Nina is separated from Su, and the former is left to explore Singapore like a local. A key scene is Nina sitting down to a meal in a family home. Despite no real common language connection, she has the most authentic and real experience to date. Viewing a band on the roof and several other asides quickly follow, nailing home the point that the best part of life is found by stepping outside your own boundaries.
Nina Endo and Sumire are completely naturalistic versions of their own public personas, which is presumably why their characters are named after the actresses. There’s a really fun scene in which Nina and Su just start performing a little impromptu hip hop dance on a public bridge. It could be an Instagram Moment, or another is a series of stylistic flourishes from Miyazaki. That it comes completely without context, and diappears as quickly as a Snapchat story, is part of its charm.
There’s a dreamlike quality to the way TOURISM wraps up, with the disembodied voice of a child narrator (only her twice before in the film) telling us about meeting Nina in New York. “But let’s keep that for another time,” she concludes. Without any resolution, we are left to assume that Nina finds her way and chooses a completely different path, having forged an entirely separate identity for herself. She’s probably still out there somewhere too.
2018 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Daisuke Miyazaki | WRITER: Daisuke Miyazaki | CAST: Nina Endô, Sumire | DISTRIBUTOR: Japan Cuts (US) | RUNNING TIME: 77 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 29 July 2018 (Japan Cuts)
