A sad tale well-told, A Far Shore (Tooi tokoro), bowing in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe competition, is the story of fun-loving Aoi who, at 17, has a two-year-old son and a worthless boy-husband who lives off her earnings as an underage nightclub hostess. From the start of Masaaki Kudo’s wrenching drama, her downward spiral from entertaining men in bars to undressing for them in hotel rooms seems inevitable, given the soul-crushing poverty her entire family lives in and their constant need for money. This kind of poverty is unleavened by the dark humor to be found in Shoplifters and Parasite and so harder to stare in the face, yet Kotone Hanase’s quiet, realistic portrait of Aoi demands human sympathy and requires a moral response.
Setting a contemporary film in Okinawa, the Japanese island that played a key part in the battle for the Pacific in WW2, still carries moral weight, as though the force of the past pressed down on the people who live there today in some unspecified way (much like Drive My Car’s setting in Hiroshima). Here the island is mentioned several times as a sort of lost home, particularly by Aoi’s grandmother who hasn’t forgotten all the old traditions. But for the younger generation, whose values are indistinguishable from their counterparts in Tokyo, life no longer has a special flavor, and families no longer can be relied on for support in times of crisis.
A Far Shore can be viewed as a thematic extension of the director’s previous film Unprecedented, released last year, which described the economic hardships caused by the Covid-19 pandemic on students from low-income families. We meet Aoi in a nightclub, her pretty face made up, teasing the older men at her table about her age. Being 17 means being a legal minor (a later scene shows the police raiding clubs and cracking down on the underage trade), but for girls like Aoi and her best friend Mio, being underage means making more money.
Before she tiredly drags herself home at dawn, Aoi stops by her grandmother’s place to pick up her son Kengo. In the tiny, ratty apartment where she pays the rent, she finds Kengo’s father Masaya hungover in bed and unwilling to go to work. Though he’s a drunken, violent youth who gambles away everything she earns, actor Yoshiro Sakuma gives him a B-side of confused self-hatred that the girl identifies with. Their arguments over money end with him beating her up so severely he scars her face and she can’t work in the clubs anymore. When Masaya is arrested for starting a brawl and injuring three people, the burden of paying hundreds of thousands of yen in “settlement money” falls on Aoi’s shoulders.
She visits her father, a fisherman with a new family, but he has little money to give her; he tells her that her mother is in detention and another drain on his finances. Another blow falls when she is caught in a police raid and has to be bailed out by granny, who is so humiliated she refuses to look after Kengo anymore. Aoi dully examines her options, which fill her with self-loathing. When she starts drinking and becomes apathetic and unresponsive, Kengo is left on his own and the Child Welfare people are not far behind.
There isn’t much light at the end of this tunnel and the final scenes are hard to watch, even overly emphatic in their litany of woes and their gloom — less misery might have strengthened the ending. Only Kotone Hanase’s modulated, mature performance keeps the story engrossing and Aoi’s fate worth caring about, along with the parallel life of her light-hearted friend Mio (Yumemi Ishida), whose loyalty is the one thing she can always count on.
Clearly Masaaki Kudo and his cowriter Mami Suzuki did not intend this as the story of just one unfortunate individual. The film’s social critique comes over loud and clear, like a loudspeaker announcing that the government leader wants a kinder Okinawa that leaves no one behind. This ironic wish, which sounds like an election campaign slogan, floats over Aoi’s head unnoticed.
Director: Masaaki Kudo
Screenplay: Masaaki Kudo, Mami Suzuki
Cast: Kotone Hanase, Yumemi Ishida, Yoshiro Sakuma
Producer: Yuki Kitagawa
Cinematography: Takayuki Sugimura
Editing: Chen Shih Ting, Masaaki Kudo
Production design: Ran Kobayashi
Music: Masamichi Shigeno
Sound: Keefar
Production companies: Allen, The Fool
World Sales: Alpha Violet
Venue: KVIFF Film Festival (Crystal Globe competition)
In Japanese, Okinawan
128 minutes