Girl meets boy, girl skims stones with boy, girl and boy part ways – that’s There Is A Stone in a nutshell. But never has less turned out to be so much more. Tatsunari Ota’s second feature is one beautiful, slow-burning fire of a film, with the young Japanese filmmaker allowing plentiful of space and time for his sensitive yet socially awkward characters to breathe in a ravishing setting drawn out of a small, nondescript town in provincial Japan.
Revolving around the brief encounter and sad separation between two nameless, newly acquainted strangers over two days and one night, There Is A Stone is a gentle and heartrending depiction of how people yearn for some kind of human connection with someone sometime somewhere. With the two leading actors delivering controlled and physically nuanced performances within a poetically minimalistic setting, Ota’s film offers a taut, emotional story with the characters’ bubbling frisson manifesting itself through their improvised games and innocent walkabouts.
Conjuring the spirit of many emotionally suppressed characters in the history of Japanese cinema (the silently sighing star-crossed lovers in Yoshimitsu Morita’s And Then, for example) and also that of individuals bumbling through quixotic quests (Albert Serra’s Honour of the Knights comes to mind), Ota has delivered something that’s at once a pure, heartfelt ode about loneliness and also an inventive formal experiment. After last year’s Tokyo FilmEx and Berlinale Forum, There Is A Stone should continue skipping along nicely on the festival circuit, its pedigree receiving a further bounce after its triumph at the international competition of the Jeonju International Film Festival last week.
The film begins with a young woman (An Ogawa) walking into view and asking locals for directions to landmarks nobody has heard of and then, in desperation, pleading for a hint of “somewhere interesting” to go to. With the adults being indifferent, she joins a group of schoolchildren for a kick-about in a makeshift soccer pitch, but that also peters out quickly when the boys go home. A kindred soul finally appears in the shape of a stone-skipping young man (Tsuchi Kano) by the river: thus begins a silently joyous afternoon where their relationship slowly grows as they invent more diversions with rocks and branches.
The spell is broken when the man offers to piggyback the woman across the river – she recoils from such physical closeness, and then he regrets that his gesture was misconstrued. They begin to drift apart slowly as dusk begins to set in. Having already worked wonders in elevating their daytime mundane activities into something poetic and picturesque, Yuji Fukaya’s camerawork becomes even more sublime in the dark. The woman wanders on through country lanes, her face lit up by her cellphone; the man returns to his chiaroscuro-lit home, his fond remembrance of fleeting moments of happiness represented by close-ups of his hands gently washing his soaked socks and writing in his diary.
“Met a girl by the river; didn’t get to know her name,” the man writes. Neither did we get to know her name, or his, or where they are coming from or going to. Ota lightens things up during the last, morning-after reel, with the woman spending some time with a dog and then greeting the sight of her new friend from afar with a radiant smile, but never are we closer to knowing what the future holds for them or for the dilapidated post-industrial town they walked around. But that mystery and the ambiguity are what maintains the tension of There Is A Stone, as the viewer shares the protagonists’ melancholy memories of the one pleasant afternoon (and one desolate evening) which went before. Having depicted both mental and physical landscapes in the most vivid of ways, Ota’s standing as one of the most inventive young Japanese filmmakers around seems set in stone.
Director, screenwriter: Tatsunari Ota
Cast: An Ogawa, Tsuchi Kano
Producers: Tatsunari Ota, Sachihiko Tanaka, Kotaro Kimura
Director of photography: Yuji Fukaya
Editor: Keiko Okawa
Music composer: Shu Oh
Sound designer: Young Chang Koh
Production company: Tastunari Ota
World sales: Pascale Ramonda
Venue: Jeonju International Film Festival (International Competition)
In Japanese
104 minutes
