Summary
A series of interconnected and entwined narratives that explore the feeling of isolation in a big city, the need for some kind of connection, and the interior pressure that we all put on ourselves.
If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s how important it is to find connections — and how keenly one feels the absence of them. While Murayama Takeshi’s debut narrative feature isn’t specifically about the current global situation, it certainly speaks to the isolation one can feel even when living in one of the most populous cities in the world.
SPAGHETTI CODE LOVE (スパゲティコード・ラブ) begins with a question: “Why? Why me?” It’s the anguished cry of a child in an arcade, and all a (as-yet-unnamed) woman can do is just hold him. So begins a series of interconnected stories of people looking for love and companionship in Tokyo, and the collision of their expectations with reality.
There are 13 people that we meet in this hyperlinked drama, a complex collection of interwoven stories that occasionally intersect. There’s struggling photographer Tsubasa (Nino Furuhata), for example, who believed that everything would be better when he moved to Tokyo. He communicates with an impressionable teen via Twitter who comes to the city with stars in her eyes. Tsubasa thinks his big break will come when he gets to shoot model Kurosu Rin (Yagi Rikako), but her diva antics and internal insecurity kill that dream immediately.
There’s an Uber delivery rider obsessed with an idol, determined to forget her after 1,000 deliveries. A pair of high school students constantly and morbidly talk about death. Another school student angsts over a life plan assignment that spins him into an existential crisis. One woman spends all of her money on an online fortune teller while her neighbour listens and judges her. Natsumi (Kagawa Saya) feels like the only thing she has to offer potential relationships is her body. A different woman regularly greets a man every night with a home cooked meal. “I’m fine being ordinary,” she thinks. “As long as he’s with me.”
What director Murayama and writer Naomi Hiruta do so well in this film is tap into the interiority of these separate but connected individuals. Overlapping dialogue and voice overs show us the face they present to the world versus the one they keep to themselves, such as Natsumi and her boyfriend’s very different takes on an argument. Kurosu Rin is a great example of this, at one point repeating “I’m special” to herself as a personal mantra. What they don’t know is that there is a commonality to their pain, which Murayama demonstrates through montages showing each of them having similarly existential thoughts at the same time.
It’s beautifully photographed too, with cinematographer Chigi Kanbe (a regular collaborator with Shunji Iwai) lensing Tokyo and its surrounds with a lovingly crisp lens. The opening shot, for example, is almost entirely shot through the filter of an arcade machine’s glass. Together they paint the city as a huge and beautiful place — which it is, of course — but it serves as a stark contrast to the unfulfilled dreams of its inhabitants.
One of the recurring motifs in the film is the old ‘tree falling in the woods’ thought experiment: if nobody hears your internal angst, does it really exist? Coupled with the spaghetti code of the title, which generally refers to unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code, the film becomes it’s own thought experiment about what happens when we let go of our baggage and embrace the idea of of having no plan at all.
2021 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Murayama Takeshi | WRITERS: Naomi Hiruta | CAST: Yuki Kura, Toko Miura, Hiroya Shimizu, Nino Furuhata, Yagi Rikako, Kagawa Saya | DISTRIBUTOR: Happinet Phantom Studios, JAPAN CUTS 2021 | RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 22 August – 2 September 2021 (JAPAN CUTS 2021)
