Editor's Note: If you "don't want to sleep" or "can't sleep," read on.
There may be a literary film here, and there may be a horror film here. I don't know if you'll fall asleep or if you'll be scared even more out of bed.
Tonight, I introduce the recent work of Japanese female director Mikazu Nishikawa, a film that makes people constantly introspective.
Poster of "Excuses Forever"
Director Mikazu Nishikawa's other identity is a novelist. In 2016, the novel "Forever Excuse" was nominated for the Naoki Award and won the 4th place in the Japan Bookstore Award, and the film was released after filming.
Miwa Nishikawa (left) Hirokazu Yoreeda
As a "disciple" of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nishikawa Miwa, like Ise, was born in the Waseda Literature Department. After graduation, Nishikawa, torn between working for a publishing house or a film production company, interviewed a TELEVISION production company, and the interviewer was Kore-eda. He was a TV producer at the time and was ready to turn to filmmaking.
So the 23-year-old Miwa Nishikawa became a newcomer director and was a member of Kore-eda's team, appearing as a staff member on the set of Ishi's second film, "Next Stop, Heaven". It is a branch that encourages Nishikawa, who aspires to be a director, to "write his own script as soon as possible even if it is a day early" and "come up with his own shooting plan and outline".
Miwa Nishikawa during the assistant director period
Under the supervision of Shie, at the age of 28, Nishikawa made a successful debut with his self-written and self-directed debut "Snake Strawberry".
Nishikawa not only wrote the film script himself, but also wrote the script into a novel after filming. Taking the film shooting as an opportunity, Nishikawa collected more material and discovered more angles. She presents these findings in a textual manner, complementing the content of the images.
After making his second film, Swing, Nishikawa published the novel "Swing" (nominated for the Yukio Mishima Award), the third "Dear Doctor" and "God of Yesterday" (nominated for the Naoki Award), and "Green Spring" after "The Two Who Sold Dreams". This time, the order of creation of "Eternal Excuse" is the opposite, first write a novel, and then visualize.
Yukio
Yuki and his wife and children
The protagonist of the film, Yukio Ikasa (Masahiro Motoki), is a writer who starts writing after his wife (Eiri Fukatsu), who is a barber, quits her job as an editor. He went through a long period of unknown life, during which his wife supported the family. After becoming a best-selling author, Yukio often showed his face on television, and his gratitude to his wife was intertwined with a twisted conceit, and a gap between the husband and wife gradually developed.
Later, Yukio cheated with the young female editor, at this time his wife was traveling with friends, and he was killed in a bus accident, and Yukio became "the party who was left behind". He seems to calmly handle the funeral, playing the role of a sad and indignant husband under the camera, but he can't sort out his emotions, the pace of life is disrupted, and the writing is also in a bottleneck.
Yukio takes care of his wife's friend's two children.
On the other hand, after the death of a friend of the wife, she left her young son and daughter and her husband who drove a long-distance van. Yukio takes on the task of caring for these two unrelated children, reconstructing the meaning of life through a period of time that completely deviates from the original daily trajectory.
Miwa Nishikawa said that the protagonist, Yukio, has his own projection. This is not a typical story protagonist, but a character who is extremely offensive.
Disguise is the norm in Yukio Igasaka's life. This disguise, out of selfishness and self-preservation, freezes his emotions and avoids revealing his true self in case he is overwhelmed by the surging waves of emotions.
He can't squeeze a tear after his wife's death, but he can freely perform a sad look under the camera and give an emotional speech according to the needs of the program.
The wife cut her husband's hair
At the beginning of the movie, his wife gets a haircut for him, and Yukio, because he does not want to be known by his real name, blames his wife for being too casual when he receives strange calls - "Writer Tsumura Kei" is his well-groomed masquerade, which is not connected to his downcast past, and uses a pen name to ensure that everything is presented in a way that he can control.
Driven by feelings of insecurity and selfishness, Yukio turns others away under the appearance of normal behavior. His indifference and egoism, though well-concealed, create an unfillable black hole in his own life.
The text message left on his wife's mobile phone stated that she had learned about Yukio's cheating and was ready to break up, and Yukio's reaction was sudden anger. Her breakup declaration and her death had left his life out of control, which was hard for him to accept.
Infidelity and accidents, self and others, middle-aged people and children, "Eternal Excuses" carries multiple themes. The story begins with the unexpected death of the wife, and then the husband is the first point of view. As the party who is left behind, life will continue, and re-examining the weight of life in the midst of the impermanent fate can be seen as an echo variation of the theme of the "3.11" disaster.
The connection between the ego and the world is fragile and ethereal, and the death of the wife severes the only real connection. After a period of panic and busyness, the feeling of indebtedness to middle-aged childless people surfaced. My own life is no longer happy because of freedom, but is nothing because of freedom.
After Yukio intervenes in the life of his wife's friend's family, the movie seems to become warm and vulgar in an instant. Middle-aged men grow up by taking care of their children and letting go of their naivety, and there are many such stories. What is special about "The Excuse of Eternity" is that Yukio is always swinging from side to side and always has other motives.
The director carefully conceals this self-dissection in the plot, depicting the protagonist's subtle mentality from a sharp and calm objective perspective.
He thought the children were troublesome and incomprehensible; he looked down on his father, who was a truck driver, and their taste in life was obviously not on one level; he could not truly sympathize with the family, their lives were too casual, unattainable, and easy to satisfy, and they were typical of not showing up.
But as a writer, entering the family, he is experiencing life; as a "lonely man who lost his wife to an accident", he once again finds excuses and devotes himself to playing the role of a loving uncle next door.
However, comparing himself, who was accustomed to being embarrassed, with this family, he began to envy this depressed family. They rely on each other and pin the meaning of life on each other, thus obtaining the life energy to try to survive. Living only for oneself means nothingness, loneliness, and goallessness.
The truck driver even easily found the remarriage, and the writer's painstaking connection with the children was about to be cut off, once again falling into the situation of a broken stem.
Just when the writer's mind was about to be crushed, the ending turned, he perked up, wrote the experience after his wife's death into a work published, turned over overnight, and returned to the status of a best-selling author.
At the new book launch, he seemed to accept the childish thanks of the two children, and the mourning of the viewers seemed unnecessary.
Interestingly, at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, the film was translated as "The Immoral Husband", which corresponds to Mikazu Nishikawa's last film, "The Two Who Sell Dreams" (Hong Kong translation of "Immoral Couple").
If you look at this movie from the perspective of moral and ethical drama, it is obviously completely deviated. At its core, it is introspective, the role of the writer, the self-dissection of director Mikazu Nishikawa, and also allows the film audience to enter a process of self-examination within two hours from a calm bystander.
As for the attitude to face relatives, the answer given by "Eternal Excuse", just like the texture of 16mm coarse-grained film, is still warm: people get the meaning of life when they are needed, and they get love in return at the same time.