Introduction

Many fans of Japanese cinema will know Shinji Imaoka is one of the directors known collectively as the “Seven Lucky Gods of Pink”. Yet, sometime Imaoka leaves the genre of soft-erotism behind to create something different. Yet, what he delivers with Is This Heaven? is far from conventional.

Review

One afternoon, Nobuo Kawashima (Hidetoshi Kawaya) and his wife Mayuko (Aki Takeda) suddenly find themselves on a beach far from home. Disoriented, confused, but strangely happy as well, they wander on the beach, until Kawashima sees Yoshiya Ueno (-) dancing on the wave breaker. There happy reunion is disturbed when Kawashima realizes that Ueno died a week ago.

Is This Heaven? offers an experimental experience that invites the spectator to answer the question as to what kind of space our characters wander around in. As revealing our own answer would complicate the spectator’s enjoyment in grasping the answer as the encounters concatenate, we will focus, in our review, on the division of the narrative into four acts.

What’s most important to note is that each act is named after a different kind of alcohol and that said drink structures its unfolding. However, the alcohol is not merely an impetus that determines the interactions, but an element that, by visually insisting throughout the act, attains an evocative effect and implicitly offers morsels of signification to the spectator. Over the various acts, the spectator slowly gains a sense of Nobuo’s subjective position, of the centrality of the phantasmatic element of failure that determines his acts and signifiers. It is not that difficult to realize that alcohol is a failed medicative way to deal with his belief in his own (phallic) insufficiency (Narra-note 1).   

In Act 1, which is called A Can Of Chuhai, the cans of Chuhai are utilized to reveal Nobuo Kawashima as a drunkard. The insistence of the cans of Chuhai, furthermore, imply that alcohol has something to do with his presence in this otherworldly place. In Act 2 called nihonshu, a woman named Yumiko and her bottle of Shinigami rice wine instigates a sense of discord between Nobuo and Mayuko. In our view, what Imaoka echoes in this part is nothing other than the relational destructivity of alcohol. He elegantly evokes how alcohol, by becoming the central object in a subject’s logic, complicates one’s relational functioning (Psycho-note 1).        

Act 3 called Whiskey fleetingly highlights the dynamic that compels Nobuo into alcoholism and confronts him, due to an unexpected encounter and a bottle of whiskey, with the husband he never was – he sees, in other words, his failure reflected to him. And act 4, the last can of Chuhai, Nobuo receives a surprising answer that contradicts the fantasy that underpins the whole of his subjective logic.

The composition of Is This Heaven? offers a nice blend between static shots and slow deliberate dynamism – fluid as well as shaky. Due to Imaoka’s reliance on long takes, the unfolding of Nobuo’s trajectory happens at a deliberate and peaceful pace.

What makes Imaoka’s film so atmospheric and ensures its other-worldly flavour is the musical accompaniment and the unique sound-design. The music, reminiscent of the pieces utilized during meditation, breathes a dreaminess into the unfolding of the narrative. The peculiar sound design, on the other hand, emphasizes this other-worldliness by cutting the voice off from its place of enunciation. The voice, rather than leaving the body of the speaker, reverberates bodiless within the narrative space (Sound-note 1).

The estranging feeling that clings to the narrative spaces is also function of the acting-performances. By letting his actors perform more artistically (e.g. dancing on the street), Imaoka  vibrates the mundanity of his imagery and highlights that this place, despite feeling ordinary and familiar, is nowhere on this material planet.    

Is This Heaven? is an experimental narrative that gives the idea of wandering spirits a fresh and whimsical spin. With his narrative, structured around alcohol and its effect on the social fabric, Imaoka elegantly invites the spectator to analyse the effects of the myriad encounters and formulate an answer to the question as to whether this place is truly heaven or not.    

Notes

Narra-note 1: Whilethe focus in Is This Heaven? is on Nobuo, his trajectory also allows us make sense of the others who wander around this heavenly space. In our view, Nobuo becomes the object that the other can use to move on. In other words, the act of wandering is a sign of something unresolved, of a inner conflict that forms on obstacle to move on.   

Psycho-note 1: Consuming alcohol is not something that can be utilized to form a social bond, but something which radically empties it. As the alcohol is the central object in one’s mental logic, the subject to subject interactions become extremely imaginary, superficial, and volatile.

Sound-note 1: There are, however, various moments where the voice returns to the body and the moving mouth.