To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL and the 90th anniversary of Kawaguchi city, Naoya Fujita set out to deliver a celebratory film. However, while Fujita worked together with people he knew from his university days – writer Suzuyuki Kaneko and producer Yujiro Imae, he challenged himself to deliver a different style that his usual work. As befitting a ‘celebratory’ film, Fujita did not simply opt for a light-hearted coming-of-age film but sought to craft a film that celebrates the art of acting as well as the importance of the audiences.  

Yuki Iwate (Shion Matsufuji), a member of his father’s traveling theatre troupe, has a rather patchwork-like school-life – a concatenation of school-transferring in accordance to where to troupe temporarily settles down. At the meeting to finalize his latest transfer, Yuki asks his new homeroom teacher to keep the fact that he belongs to a theatre troupe a secret and that he, as he will only be at school for a month, has no need for friends.

One day, as he prepares to go home, his homeroom teacher asks him to bring some stuff to Ken Ogawa (Jun Saito), a classmate who has been absent from school. Not much later, he unknowingly intrudes in Ken’s hidden subjective space by attending a performance of Patty Five, the idol-band where Asuka (Hirona Murata), the run-away daughter of the theatre troupe’s biggest fan Yoko (Reiko Takashima), performs in. 

Confetti offers the spectator, first and foremost, a glance at what happens backstage of a traveling theatre troupe. The film does not only show the number of boxes the troupe must transport from each location to each location, but also shows the material needed for the performances – fans, fabrics, make-up materials, … etc. – and how performers prepare themselves – e.g. painting their bodies and faces, donning their traditional garments – for their performance.

Fujita surprises the spectator by not tracing out one subjective trajectory in his coming-of-age narrative, but three. By introducing three intertwining trajectories, Fujita succeeds in staging that what allows the subject to bend his own trajectory is the encounter – the meeting of signifiers, the bumping into other desires.

The main subjective trajectory Fujita traces out in Confetti is Yuki’s. He is pushed on his trajectory when his father confronts him with the shallowness of his performance – “Expressions [can only] become stronger when you’re delivering them to someone”. His father, unwittingly, signals to Yuki that his protective choice of not investing in social relationships has become an obstacle for his performance. However, it is not simply that he lacks an address for his performance, but that he, avoiding the emotional flow of human interactions, is unable to fuel his performative message to the Other with genuine emotion.

To put it differently, his relational deprivation renders him unable to concretize the notion of the audience, to subjectivity this abstract given by turning it into the Other he, as subject, wants to address. Or, to get to the fundamental point, Yuki has, despite the confidence by which he writes down actor as his future plan, has not yet committed himself, as subject, to that dream precisely because he has no Other to address (Narra-note 1).

Yet, even though Yuki’s tries his best to keep the Other at bay, circumstances cause him to become subjected to two encounters. As the spectator rightly suspects, these encounters create the necessary space for Yuki to question his own desire, to uncover where his desire truly points at. It is, in other words, by meeting the desire of the Other that Yuki will become able to position himself, as subject, with respect to the desire of his father (Toru Kizu) – to become an actor or not.

However, what Yuki encounters in this Other is not desire in its unfiltered beauty, but desire in a state of conflict. Ken, an academically gifted junior high school student, stopped going to school and started to invest time into idols. Via Maya (Sara Hayama), Ken’s ex-girlfriend, the spectator can glance at the logic of his absence and realize Ken’s turn to the idol-image is function of a struggle with fleeting physical imprints of romantic desire – human touches of desire (Narra-note 2).   

Asaka, Yoko’s daughter, on the other hand, finds herself, after her idol-dream fell apart due to the predatory practices of her management agency, working at the troupe. Some spectators will readily assume that Asaka’s desire is evident, yet one should be wary not to confuse dream with desire. While Asaka’s dream of becoming an idol, the fixated fictional endpoint for her desire, is shattered, the discovery of a different fictional frame from which to desire from remains possible.   

Naoya Fujita brings the narrative of Yuki alive with a balanced blend of static and dynamic moments. While the composition does not offer anything groundbreaking, Fujita does deliver, in part due to the thoughtful colour-grading and pleasant lightning-design, a visual fabric that is visually pleasing and easy to look at (Cine-note 1).  

Fujita opts, in line with similar films, to frame the conversational moments from a distance and heavily rely on medium shots and full shots. He, thus, creates space for his cast to not only breathe a genuine feel into the conversational moments, but also to stage how the exchange of signifiers affects the bodies of their characters.

The composition highlights that Fujita thinks of Confetti as a drama of the signifier, a dramatic exploration of how the spoken signifier affects the subject, of how the signifier compels the subject to realize himself, as subject, on the societal stage. The light-hearted musical accompaniment echoes that this film hopes to inspire subjects – subjects stuck between accepting or refusing a choice that, in their view, has already been made.     

Confetti is a pleasant film that underlines, in an elegant and touching manner, the necessity for the subject to find an Other to commit himself to his dream, to his desire. Naoya Fujita does not only understand that subjective commitment to desire depends on the installation of an Other to address, but also proves that he can frame this truth in a way that will inspire audiences.  

Notes

Narra-note 1: Yuki lacks a concrete other to be able to address the (m)Other with his acting. The play ‘The Long-Sought Mother’ the troupe performs on the request of Yuki is not only addressed to Ken, but, via Ken, to the mother as an absent symbolic presence.

Asaka’s statement ‘’ in the final moments of the narrative – “Aren’t you loved by so many people” – allows us to further concretize our interpretation. What the actor seeks is not merely a concrete other to address, but someone who gives what is asked to the symbolic (m)other: a fleeting sign of love.

The ability to subjectify oneself through acting is, in this sense, deeply linked by establishing an audience for oneself, by erecting an Other to address.   

Narra-note 2: Ken, moreover, struggles to enflame his own desire – he also does not know what he wants. His turn to the image of the idol can, in this sense, also be read as a defence against the question of his own desire raised by the Other’s desiring touch.

Cine-note 1: Naoya Fujita delivers a composition that feels, in a certain sense, familiar – static shots are utilized to frame conversational moments, tracking movement follows the main character as he traverses the narrative spaces.