Summary
A laser focus on a man whose actions during 3/11 have irrevocably impacted him in the years that follow.
It’s been just over a decade since the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011. Dozens of films and documentaries have been made since then, from the blockbuster action film Fukushima 50 to the more contemplative Voices in the Wind. With BOLT we get a little of each as Kaizo Hayashi’s stark film splits the narrative three ways.
The film opens on 3/11 with literal falling bolts, and a crew of men are assigned as the immediate response to the nuclear leak. Playing out almost like a horror film, a man (Masatoshi Nagase) witnesses a team heroically try to reattach a bolt to stop a radioactive leak, only for the efforts to fail at the last minute.
The tense opener belies the tone of the rest of the film. The two subsequent sections — simply labelled ‘Episode 2’ and ‘Episode 3’ in elegant on-screen text — are set a couple of years following the event. Here we see how the man’s life has irrevocably changed since that fateful day.
In the second episode, set in the evacuation zone exactly two years later, the man is assisting the clean-up efforts. Pursued by the past, represented by the repeated motif of a colourful aurora following him, he leafs through photos albums (left from the before times) while spotting bodies that aren’t really there. When speaking to his motivations, he simply replies that “Somebody has to do it.”
This becomes something like the film’s unwritten theme: by the time we reach the third episode, where he is one of the last left helping, his usefulness has become almost a compulsion. Yet when he encounters a woman with a flat tyre on her way to Hokkaido, his personal cycle might at last be broken.
From the claustrophic and gritty realism of the opening scenes to the crisp Yamagata snowscapes of the final episode, Yûichi Nagata’s photography is unquestionably handsome. This greatly aids the laser focus of this particular take on the tragedy, one that doesn’t attempt to take a snapshot of a whole nation but rather funnel some of those feelings into the experience of a single man.
As the film takes its final steps, Kaizo Hayashi veers the audience into slightly surreal territory. It’s emblematic of the way that the leading man’s mind has been divided in the years since the incident. Yet as an overt reference to the Tokyo Olympics is dropped, it’s suggested that the nation is now ready to move on, even if the man is taking his first steps in that direction.
2019 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Kaizo Hayashi | WRITERS: Kaizo Hayashi | CAST: Masatoshi Nagase, Sarara Tsukifune, Kazuhiko Kanayama, Elvis Goto, Shima Onishi | DISTRIBUTOR: Dream Kid, Nippon Connection (GER) | RUNNING TIME: 80 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 1-6 June 2021 (Nippon Connection)
