Sidonie au Japon

 

"We live in a country that doesn't exist"

If one could summarize this film in a single phrase, it would be this one. These are the first words that Sidonie manages to push out onto the page after her prolonged period of utter grief. In fact, they may be the only words ever truly spoken during her entire trip to Japan despite numerous scenes of dialogue. Modernist architecture, cultural sterility and cinematic linearity overpower our senses from the very first moments that the country appears on the silver screen. Indeed, Sidonie a writer who has lost her entire family in two separate car accidents feels at home in the land of the rising sun. She even goes as far as to remark that everything around her feels familiar, it merely has a different texture from home. Sidonie's life has become flavored by an intense sterility used to cover the bitter taste of trauma, much like post-war Japanese culture in the eyes of the director. At moments, she seems to blend into the frame altogether, both metaphorically and cinematographically becoming forced into a role of the passive observer despite her colorful clothing. Like Japan, Sidonie becomes defined by her lack of expressiveness and emotion, drowning in an overwhelming sea of internalized pain. She has lost so much control over her life that she starts seeing the ghost of her dead husband, often appearing in her hotel rooms. As the film follows its intentionally linear plot, she falls in love with Kenzo, her stoic publisher similarly plagued by family tragedies of Hiroshima and other calamities, and the ghost slowly fades from the story. Nothing should surprise the viewer in the film, there are no twists, no turns or tricks. There are merely two souls existing together in the pain of loss through an intermingling between Sidonie's western disposition and Kenzo's diametrically opposed stone-faced personality. Unfortunately, the film ends positively, asserting that there is a reconciliation - Sidonie and Kenzo make love. The sex scene is not portrayed classically, the shots are discretized, nothing more than a few photographs of them grasping each others nude bodies can be seen. Quite intentionally, the director disrupts the continuous nature of film itself to demonstrate that Sidonie has, in one way or another, moved away from her trauma. As she gives her lover one last embrace at the airport and briskly walks away, we are left with the lingering sensation that she hasn't healed in a classical sense. Perhaps she has taken Kenzo's advice to heart - ghosts are always around us, but its up to us whether we choose to let them into our lives.