KOTA NAKANO: RETAKE (2023) JAPAN CUTS 2024A simple film about high school kids making a film becomes something a more complex through the use of multiple "takes" It's the summer holidays. The energetic, grownup Yu (Urara), with her glittering, Katharine Hepburn smile, sees her boyish, wide-eyed, and enamored high school classmate Kei (Yutâ Mutô) shooting her across a bridge with his camera and recruits him to shoot a film she wants to direct as a school project. Kei recruits Jirô (Ryûsei Chiba), who's artistic, to play a boy who draws and Yu makes him the main actor in her film along with Umi (Nako Ôhara) playing a girl Jiro's interested in. They get Yu's guitar bandmate Arisa to record the sound. In the film, Umi will accompany Jiro to a land where time stands still so he can draw the girl, who is always in motion. They're making a movie about making a movie - or somebody is. But the first run-through is only the beginning.
Initially, these five young people are cute; they're having fun. There is a sense of enjoyment in being out in nature in lovely weather. They spend a lot of time by a roaring stream and waterfall. The roaring water becomes a character in itself, perhaps the most dynamic one.
After about 44 minutes, the film goes back over the filmmaking again, this time adding more detail and different angles to the original shots, and adding new shots or scenes. This is after Yu has told Kei on the phone that she's not coming back to direct because she finds the others too unmotivated. After this conversation, Kei says "Cut!" and gets up and comes toward the camera to turn it off. The next shot is of the actor who plays Kei, Yutâ Mutô, watching this previous shot on a screen. The meta POV has been established.
But we then move forward to other takes of earlier action. A chat between Arisa and Kei reveals that they may both see Yu as somewhat arrogant, though Kei is always easygoing and unflappable with her. He's a bit wishy-washy too, never having much of an opinion, for instance, about what to do the film's "last scene". Is Yutâ Mutô the dullest actor or the best actor in the film?
From the beginning, the filmmaking is so simple the line between life and "art" begins to dissolve quite quickly. Four of the five assemble into two couples. Kei is interested in Yu, though when she gets tired and overwhelmed with the filmmaking and rests her head on his chest he doesn't know what to do. Going around together for the film shoot, Jirô and Umi begin to like being together. Yu takes Kei later, just the two of them, "location scouting," to more rushing water, another setting, a train ride away, of natural beauty.
Yu and Kei differ on several things, and Kei defers to her, but she startles him at one point back at school by leaving him to finish the editing by himself. He films her with Umi in the music room recording a composition for the film score. Then Yu has an idea for the "last scene" that turns out to be dangerous. As a Letterboxd writer says, the film "doubles and triples back on itself.
One idea for the final sequence leads to a mishap, though apparently after the victim recovers, the little team commits to resuming the shoot. It would have been possible to introduce haunting, creepy variations in the manner of a Michael Haneke film. But this is not Kota Nakano's aim here. In fact, after the same moment when Yu says she's happy and Kei agrees and she wonders what the "last scene" should be is repeated for a Take 4, a Take 5, a Take 6 and a Take 7, all nearly identical, we're ready not just to yell "Cut!" but "Enough, already!" But some clumsiness in the editing notwithstanding, the line between reality and illusion has been broached and this is the kind of festival film that pleases people in search of tricky screenplays.
Retake リテイク, 110 mins., debuted at Tokyo (Pia Film Festival) where it won the Grand Prize. Screened for this review as part of the New York Japan Cuts series in the Next Generation section (Jul. 10-21, 2024).
URARA, YUTÂ MUTÔ, AND NAKO ÔHARA IN RETAKE
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