Introduction

With her first feature film Our House (2017), Yui Kiyohara immediately caught the eye of international critics and audiences. Her film did not only earn the Grand Prize at the Pia Film Festival as well as the Best Director award at the 2018 Asian New Talent Awards in Shanghai.

For her second feature film – the 26th PFF scholarship film, she searches a way to further develop and hone her vision. This time around, she receives support from cinematographer Yukiko Iioka to bring her kind of cinema to life. Can she succeed in making the spectator introspect his own life once again?     

Review

One day in Tama New Town, a town on the outskirts of Tokyo. The unemployed Chizu (Kumi Hyodo) decides to use the address on a postcard to meet her old friend. On her way, she wanders into a traditional Japanese sweets shop. Much to her surprise, the shopkeeper (-) is an old friend of hers. 

Not long after checking the gas meter standings at the Suwa Housing Complex, Sanae (Minami Oba) encounters Takada (Tadashi Okujino), an elderly man with dementia reported to be missing. While she tries to guide him back home, his firm belief that he still lives in Nagayama short-circuits her attempt. Yet, she accompanies him on his path.

Around the same time, Natsu (Ai Mikami), who often dances at the park, decide to visit the mother of her deceased friend Dai before meeting up with her friend to visit a museum dedicated to the remains of the Jomon-period.

Remembering Every Night is not an easy narrative and many spectators will be put off by the lack of a clear direction. Yet, those spectators who can enjoy some frustration, will be able to perceive that the message of the narrative expresses itself in the very echo created by the cross-fertilization between the wandering signifier and the lingering silence. With her serene direction, Kiyohara asks the spectator to recognize the subjective quality of what remains unsaid – an unsaid that is either not vocalized or subtly seeps out the signifiers the subject addresses to the Other.  

What rears its head within the gap between signifiers is the changing social fabric and the eternal presence of lack. Kiyohara elegantly touches upon the loosening of social bonds, the disintegration of former close-knit communities, and the increased isolation of subjects. Kiyohara’s emphasis on silence – i.e. the space between signifiers, as well as the way she structures the conversations enable her to highlight the following truth: that, due to disintegration of social bonds within the modern societal field, a certain loneliness has come to mark many subjects and that every subject needs to deal with a certain kind of dislocation. Each of the women who wander the streets of Tama New Town ‘misses’ something and carries a unresolved injury on their ego.  

Yet, besides echoing the increased presence of loneliness within the societal field, Remembering Every Night also touches upon the impact of lack on the subject as such and the fabric of his relationships. Kiyohara brings the impact of lack mainly to the fore via the narrative element of the memory. The memory, even if it is not physical, constitutes a presence – a visual and verbal remainder of what has passed.

The strange character of a memory, however, is that it, as a presence, echoes a material absence. And, as a memory, generally speaking, lacks a true material support, it is always in danger to dissipate as time goes by. In fact, by focusing on emptiness and the dimension of wandering, Kiyohara makes us feel the flow of time and its erosive effects – i.e. the loss the ticking of the clock inflicts on the subject and his relationships (Narra-note 1). With her narrative, Kiyohara makes the spectator conscious of the very ephemerality of life and the way it is radically structured around missed encounters, fleeting moments of joy, and experiences of loss.

For her composition, Yui Kiyohara mainly relies on concatenating static shots in an unhurried fashion. While the slow pace ensures that the visual fabric attains a serene feel, Kiyohara’s shots also subtle emphasize the stillness and mundanity that marks her narrative spaces.

In the case Kiyohara introduces some dynamism into her composition, she does so in a way that the serene nature and the stillness that marks the frame remains intact. Her dynamic shots have, just like the rhythm of the concatenation, a peaceful pace and are temporally long.  

While Kiyohara does not explicitly echo a documentary feel at a visual level, the natural performances coupled with the slow visual pace ensures that a certain realism comes to mark the narrative. Kiyohara’s emphasis on natural conversational flows and her reluctance to cut conversations up visually helps grounding the fictional narrative. The peculiar musical pieces, courtesy of Jon No Son, do not merely add a certain quirkiness to the unfolding of the narrative, but also further emphasize the mundane.

Remembering Every Night is an unconventional narrative that demands the spectator to yield himself completely to the mundane flow of the lives of three women. By doing so, the well-thought-out composition, which emphasizes stillness and finds its structure around prolonged gaps of silence, can bring the spectator in touch in the multitude of subjective effects of the ephemerality of life.

Notes

Narra-note 1: Chizu wanders around Tama New Town to find the house of an old friend, who once sent a postcard to her. Natsu reminiscences with her friend the days they spend with Dai. An old man, who is losing his grip on his recent memories, enjoys watching flowers.