JUNKO SUNKURADA, TOMOKO TABATA, AND KIICHI NAKAI IN MOVING

SHINJI SÔMAI: MOVING (1993) - REVIVAL FOR 2024 JAPAN CUTS

A twelve-year-old girl in early-Nineties Japan confronts her parents' separation

A guide to Shinji Sômai from BFI

About the rerelease from Hollywood Reporter

Josh Slater-Williams, BFI: "Critic Shigehiko Hasumi once suggested that Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai – who died young aged 53 in 2001, after directing 13 features – 'is the missing link between the end of the studio system of Japan and the rise of independent filmmaking.' In their compassionate depictions of loneliness and alienation, you can certainly see the influence of Somai’s films in the works of several younger directors who followed, including Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou-Chou) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse). . . So why is Somai relatively unknown in the west?"

Certainly much of Moving has a freshness, simplicity, and directness that set it apart from recent Japanese films - as is appropriate being from the point of view of a cheerful, plucky, but somewhat naive girl of twelve or so whose parents separate. The father of twelve-year-old Ren (the impressive Tomoko Tabata) suddenly moves out. She tries to pretend nothing has changed, and for a while nothing does. Eventully her schoolmates just know what's happened because she's different (and she's not the only one, though there's no support group here); it doesn't matter if they're divorced or separated. Something is "wrong," the wholeness of the traditional family unit has been broken.

Everything is from Ren's point of view throughout, and the girl's (and Tomoko Tabata's) energy seems indomitable. They sit at a thin, triangular dinner table, a will-chosen piece of decor that already communicates this family's rejection of traditional norms and the "angular," cranky relations among them, where the child holds equal weight. Ren corrects her father's table manners. She's parenting her parents, and wonders if her "Oto-San" will be able to manage on his own. Then her mother gets drunk and Ren worries about the impression this will make on the neighbors, not because she's conventional, but because she's more grownup.

It's a while before her unstoppable good cheer begins to falter, though she's often obstreperous. Her parents are too: this is part of the fun and the freshness of the film: the parents are also childish, perhaps more so, because in this modern world, they fail to maintain the discipline of traditional customs and pretend they are free to go their own way. Nobody really is.

The film is a portrait of the early Nineties, a moment in Japan when couples were beginning to regard it as acceptable to divorce or separate simply for their own reasons. The economic bubble has burst, and every adult is responsible for being financially independent. Ren's mother has gone from not working to dressing up and going out to work at a good job. Marriage is survival of the fittest”, Renko’s mom Nazuna (Junko Sakurada) later exclaims. Kenichi (Kiichi Nakai), her boyish, slightly goofy dad, has worked at home and partly played house-husband.

The roles are all confused: both parents are living by a new order but complaining that things aren't as they used to be. Ren learns family friend Yukio (Taro Tanaka), on whom she'd had an innocent childish crush, is engaged to be married, and his fiancée is unsure whether she wants to have the child. As they wander around on the scene of Ren's house it almost seems they're a surrogate family - but not one that provides stability, either.

All this confusing grownup and newfangled stuff is seen both starkly and from a distance, because we get it from Ren's point of view. Most importantly, Ren eventually becomes so confused she wonders out loud - she often asks questions out loud, by herself - why she was even born. But remember, she is still just a young girl, and all these things are external and not quite real to her.

The climax, still full of the film's initial energy but risky, because Somai doesn't know where to go with it, comes when Ren carries out a gesture that takes on literally the adult role and attempts to change things: she wants to have the three of them reunite once a week, no, maybe only once a month, but for now she takes her mother's credit card and buys reservations at a hotel by Lake Biwa, where they've been bfore, and travel there. This takes place, and then she goes off on her own, wandering into the safe, if comically confused and befuddled protection of a white-bearded and traditionally dressed old man, and thence off into the fire and energy of a local festival whose explosions are beautiful, intoxicating, and unreal. Kenichi, her father, turns up at the hotel: but this only seems to underline, for us as well as for Ren, that it's finished, which she already knew from her classmates.

It's amazing all that happens in this film as well as how clear-headed yet ultimately heartbreaking is its image of the dissolution of a marriage from the POV of an adolescent. But when the film gets into the festival, and Ren wanders off by herself, Somai loses the thread, and the action starts soft-peddling too much. Still, the vibrancy of individual scenes is unmistakeable and the realization of the character of the young girl is terrifically engaging.

Moving お引越し, 123 mins.,debuted at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, 1993. Numerous awards; 2023 Winner Venezia Classici Award, Best Restored Film. Revival screened for this review from 2024 Japan Cuts (Jul. 10-21).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.