SOSUKE IKEMATSU, KOSHI MIZUKAMI IN THE REAL YOUYUYA ISHII: THE REAL YOU 本心 (2024) - Japan Cuts Bonding in a world dominated by AIThe Real You is an adaptation of Keiichiro Hirano's 2021 novel of the same name (本心). Directed by Yuya Ishii, who also wrote the screenplay, the film opens on a stormy night when Sakuya (Sosuke Ikematsu) witnesses his mother falling into a river and then falls in himself, resulting in a year-long coma. When he wakes up everything has grownn by leaps and bounds into a world Sakuya cannot recognize. The thught that this cruel, manipulative world bound by AI is very like the Japan of today is a chilling one.
The film is gone over in detail by Haylay Scanlon of
Windows on Worlds. It probes issues of honesty and identity through a near-future dystopian tale of AI "real avatars" where have nots acting vicariously for the haves get the worst jobs ever, rather ike being an Uber Eats delivery person only much worse, and there seem to be no other jobs because everything else is automated. The haves are far above, and AI magnifies the gap between classes. In this depiction a large part of the population goes undepicted, however.
The theme is human connection and the loss of it. An important feature of this world is that the dead, whether touchingl or creepily, are resurrected to function again in virtual space for their survivors to enjoy as Virtual Figures or VFs. Sakuya (Sosuke Ikematsu), the main character, wants back his lost mother (Yuko Tanaka) with whom he has lived all his life and who was his beat friend. But when she is brought back as a VF, he cannot quite bear it. He is the voice of authenticity, and another theme is that technology alienates us from reality and our true selves no matter how cleveraly it trues to mimic those things.
Sakuya invites his mother's best friend, the younger woman Ayaka (Ayaka Miyoshi), whom he did not know, in to live with him in his and his mother's old place, along the VF version of his mother. Through the creationn of VFs from multiple sources (to make them three-dimensional) another theme develops, that we don't realy know anybody because everybody has secrets or hidden facets. Sakuya has a friend and contemporary Kishitani (Koshi Mizukami) who comes and goes and chiefly seems to exist to add energy, which he does.
Toward the end a new character appears, a have, a celebrity, Iffy (Taiga Nakano), who is wheelchair-bound. He calls on Sakoya and adopts him, impressed by a video that's gone viral in which Sakuya has done something authentic and brave, rejecting money in favor of being decent.
The filmmaking is only average, but the main actor has a certain feel of desperate authenticity, and director Ishii gets to work through the same ideas that philosophical novelist Keiichirō Hirano broaches in the adopted novel. Sometimes you feel like you're being lectured, or that the same few points - Akuya's early history of prostitution, for example - are being worked over and over. Trimming down to remove the repetitions and focus the action could have made it half an hour shorter.
The title may have rich implications in the original:
本心 【ほんしん (honshin)】
[n] true feelings; real intention; original intention; one's heart
[n] one's right mind; one's senses; one's conscience
The Real You, 122 mins., will be shown in New York July 11 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts, for which it was screened for this review.
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