A slow-moving account of the way three ordinary women spend a summer’s day in a non-descript commuter town in Japan, Remembering Every Night might at first seem an odd fit for the Berlin Film Festival’s leftfield Forum section. Scratch the film’s seemingly whimsical surface, however, and one finds an affecting and opaquely reflective study of remembrance and forgetting of people and places, and the relationships between the two.
Returning to the Forum nearly five years after becoming one of the youngest directors to screen a feature in Berlin, 30-year-old Japanese filmmaker Yui Kiyohara has delivered something very different from her Forum debut. The enigmatic Our House from 2017 is a story about two women co-existing in two parallel and sporadically intertwined universes in the same apartment, and ends with the riddles in its narrative unresolved. Remembering Every Night, however, offers a much more linear account of three distinctly separate stories, their odd collisions hardly having an impact on each other.
What makes this film memorable is its ability to evoke philosophical questions about how human existence and history are continuously formed and reshaped. And this is where the Berlinale Forum comes in: the presence of unread letters, flickering home videos, faded photographs, and museum visits tally naturally with the sidebar’s preoccupation with reworking film archives. The use of analogue film, meanwhile, should appeal to the other end of the film-going spectrum – cinephiles nostalgic for the good old simple analogue days.
Kiyohara’s three main protagonists are decades apart in age. Chizu (Hyodo Kumi) is a 44-year-old who has recently been sacked from her job in a kimono store. An old postcard inspires her to return to her hometown to look for a long-lost friend. Sanae (Minae Ohba), 33, is a gas meter inspector who keeps running into old people on her daily rounds – one foists a bag of fruit on her, the other imposes an invitation to visit his home. The 22-year-old university student Natsu (Ai Mikami), meanwhile, picks up some pictures of her best friend who has died, before visiting a historical exhibition and playing with fireworks.
Bar the transitional moments in which one character would happen to catch a glimpse or walk by another, thus passing the story from one chapter to the next, these non-events seem disparate and unrelated. But underlining all of them is the way the characters unearth and maybe even question their own buried memories and how they impact who they are now.
Chizu finds herself no longer able to navigate the streets she grew up in, just as she shudders when she discovers she can no longer find work in the few remaining old-time clothing stores. Sanae’s boyfriend converts and digitises home videos as part of his job, and she looks on in amusement and sadness at the people, pets and places she once knew, which have now vanished.
Natsu, meanwhile, experiences the ways ancient people used to live throough interactive games at the museum – something which mirrors the way she recalls the endearing moments she once spent with her deceased friend.
By having them gradually look beyond their own scheme of things, Kiyohara hints at how her characters have the potential to awaken from their own individual stupor, break out of their alienation and establish connections with society.
There’s perhaps a reason why Kiyohara chooses to set her film in New Tama Town, which just celebrated its 60th year of existence last year. While regarded either as a harbinger of modern progress or a monstrous symbol of urban sprawl – Hayao Miyazaki’s 1994 film Pom Poko is about the way the construction work imperils a clan of raccoons who have lived there for generations – the satellite city represents an exercise in erasure and sacrifice of an old history for the sake of constructing a new one.
Serious as these issues are, but Remembering Every Night is a pleasure to watch and listen to. Yukiko Iiako’s camerawork paints New Tama Town’s suffocatingly conformist buildings into a dreamlike haven of serenity, while Azusa Yamazaki’s editing delineates and reconnects the different threads well.
While a young band’s playground jam in the opening scene, featuring a snare drum, a trumpet, a broken Casio keyboard and an effect-mixer, seems to hint at more quaint music to follow, indie band jon no son’s electronic score is remarkably unintrusive, only propping up to signal key changes in the story with a few atonal musical stanzas. Produced by Japan’s premier indie event Pia Film Festival, Remembering Every Night is further proof of Kiyohara’s standing as a stellar auteur for the future, as she keeps her directorial eye on leavening the past.
Director, screenplay: Yui Kiyohara
Cast: Kumi Hyodo, Minami Ohba, Ai Mikami
Producer: Mayumi Amano
Director of photography: Yukiko Iioka
Editor: Azusa Yamazaki
Music composer: jon no son
Sound designer: Hwang Young-chang
Production companies: PFF Partners (Pia/HoriPro Inc./Nikkatsu), PFF General Incorporated Association
World sales: Parallax Films
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Forum)
In Japanese
116 minutes
