“Inspired by Hanabi, a recent song by a Japanese pop duo consisting of female vocalist/lyricist and male composer, Isshin Inudo, a filmmaker, created a short film about a bittersweet experience between father and daughter, beautifully woven with young genius dancer Karin Sugiyama’s performance”.

Impressions

This short narrative is a touching experience as the cinematography successfully supports the staging of the bittersweet experience between father and daughter (e.g. the effective framing of emotional father). The narrative is well-structured, using the cinematography to imply questions in the viewer, which are answered in conversations of images later (e.g. When Karin and her friend start running after school, the viewer doesn’t know where to.).

Nevertheless – and this is not meant as a negative comment, but as a positive critique – the bittersweet experience remains somewhat enigmatic, thus causing alot of questions and discussion. What is Karin’s intention towards her father? What purpose does she have to show her father the dance; what does she want to tell him? It seems a sort of accepting her father’s decision as well as showing him the consequences of his decision – the last dancing scene in the train seems  to underline the ‘accepting of consequences’ nature of the narrative. And to which ‘relation’ are the lyrics addressed? To herself and her friend (What is she to him and he to her?), to her father and mother, the father and his new love or to herself and her father?

After this sort impression I would describe this short narrative as a successful, but short exploration into the ‘accepting or even embracing the consequences” of, what one could call, but not not quite correctly, an external happening, i.e. the break-up of her parents’. Not without standing the moment when she tells her father, with some regret, about the dance she’ll never be able to perform with her friend and, subsequently, shows him that dance, she has accepted the way things are, the way the river flows.

Links:

Link to the official website of the pop dou Mounoon: http://www.moumoon.com/