Summary
It’s a gentle walk on a pleasant day. It’s a meditation on loss and regret. Yui Kiyohara is still walking through a former commuter town and wonderfully taking her time in the process.
Yui Kiyohara’s 2017 film Our House, an often abstract film that featured two subtly intersecting storylines, didn’t always manage to get beyond the surface level. With REMEMBERING EVERY NIGHT (すべての夜を思いだす), the filmmaker uses a similar motif played out on a broader scale – and it works wonderfully.
While this is the point in these reviews where one tends to describe the plot, there is no storyline to speak of, at least not in the traditional sense anyway. It begins with 44-year-old Chizu’s (Kumi Hyodo) trip to the employment centre, and her subsequent wanderings to find someone living in the former commuter village, Tama New Town.
During her voyages she spots university student Natsu (Ai Mikami) practising her dance moves, someone we later learn is grieving the loss of a friend and on the hunt for photographic evidence they ever existed. Also wandering the area on what feels like a pleasant summer day is Sanae (Minami Ohba), a utility inspector who gets sidetracked into helping an elderly man find his way home.
On the surface, it’s a pleasant afternoon’s walk through the suburbs, with three women crossing paths, subtly intersecting each other’s lives, or having minor near misses along the way. Everything that happens is at once immediately important and also wholly transactional. Indeed, those near misses are only obvious because the camera chooses to observe them for the audience. Unwatched, they would simply be three people going about their day.
There’s an intimacy to Kiyohara’s view of New Tama Town that no doubt comes from the time she spent there when she was younger. Developed in the early 1970s as Japan’s largest residential housing project, Kiyohara’s memory of New Tama Town is filtered through these three seemingly unrelated women – in their 20s, 30s, and 40s – while contemplating the distance between them and ultimately us as well. It’s exactly the kind of film that emerges from a post-pandemic Japan.
Despite the title, Kiyohara and cinematographer Yukiko Iioka spend the majority of their film in daylight hours. While each of the women is weighed down by their own trauma, sense of isolation and worries, the jaunty score and bright photography act to shine some kind of light of recognition on them.
While I’ve just recently declared that I might be done with slow cinema, perhaps I just wasn’t spending time with the kind that gels with me. As one of the threads comes to its natural conclusion, Chizu simply asks “Does that mean it just ends like that?” Offering no dramatic conclusions, or convenient plot ties, like the women it depicts it simply spins in its own orbit. Here is one group of people I could have happily spent the rest of the day with.
2022 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Yui Kiyohara | WRITERS: Yui Kiyohara | CAST: Hyodo Kumi, Mikami Ai, Ohba Minami | DISTRIBUTOR: KimStim | RUNNING TIME: 109 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 15 September 2023 (NYC), 22 September 2023 (LA)
