Filmic experiences can sort a transformative effect on the subject. For Yui Kusakari, the screening of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour (2015) prompted him to enter the Department of Cinema at the Nihon University College of Arts and study scriptwriting.
Driven by a need to express his current preoccupations, he did not wait for graduation to deliver his first feature film. His first passion project, receiving its world premiere in 2025 at the SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL in 2025, even managed to win the coveted Skip City Award. And, now, his debut has received its international premiere at the Nippon Connection film festival.
Two summers ago, at night, Buddha (Itsuki Kasahara) ran into the sea never to return again. Koichi (Koichi Harada), despite trying, failed to find him in the dark rolling waves – his shouts left unanswered. Mari (Kaho Mayuzumi), Buddha’s girlfriend, left puzzled by his radical flight, but this loss, a loss shared with Koichi, eventually brings them closer together. Two years after the event – to consciously affirm her acceptance of his absence, she starts dating him.
One day, while waiting on the train, Mari receives a call from Koichi to confess that he saw Buddha disappear in the dark blackness of the sea – Buddha is dead. Yet, not much later, Koichi, flowers in hand, encounters Buddha and his girlfriend Anna (-) on the street.
Long Night is a narrative that seeks to explore the effect of loss on the subject and how this loss organizes his relation with himself, the other, and the societal field that surrounds him. However, this loss is not merely physical – i.e. the separation of father and mother, the absence of a lover, a friend. What these young people have lost is the physical support for the fantasy of ‘love’; the reality of separation has put the phantasmatic answer that love is with respect to the question of the sexual relationship radically into question.
Koichi and Mari are forced to deal, in their own way, with what lies beyond this fractured fantasy: the irreducibility of the subjective difference, a truth that, when kept festering like a silent open wound, dooms the subject to radical solitude, a forlorn existence within a vast societal field. The suicidal act – and, for Mari, the divorce as well – prove the untenability of the mundane fantasy of love, of the phantasmatic idea that two subjects can be complementary.
The confrontation with the fact that Buddha is still alive re-enforces the fracture of this fantasy and accentuates that joyful interactions go hand in hand with repression – his existence presents itself as a radical betrayal of his shared past with them. His suicide attempt and his subsequent flight put the contentment that clings to their recollections radically into question; his presence exposes the mendacious quality of Koichi’s melancholic filmic collage, the documentary-like creation he watches together with Mari. His presence does not only affirm that something of his subjectivity could not be brought into play, but that the field of the imagery necessitates the flight of subjectivity – the repression of our singular Otherness.
To put it in the form of a question – a question that can guides the spectator within Kusakari’s narrative: What made Buddha attempt the suicidal act and what does this radical act reveal concerning his relation with Mari and Koichi? Kusakari, however, refuses to give the spectator an answer to this question. And, by leaving the gap of this question open, he creates a filmic space that stages the idea that the solitude that clings to the subject is caused by being unable to bring his/her subjectivity affirmatively into play at the level of speech.
If we take a closer look at Koichi and Mari, we can trace out the impact loss has had on their subjective presence. Koichi has realized a life-style that is defined by a lack of desire, a life-style that, emptied of libidinal energy, borders on depression. With a very telling sequence – i.e. Koichi watches old movie material of him, Mari and Buddha, Kusakari does not only seek to imply that the Buddha’s absence underpins his lethargic state, but also seeks to invite him to see that he, by remaining sedentary, is unconsciously performing the ‘death’ of his friend. He responds to his death with his own subjective absence because his desire was implicated in the event, in that suicidal evening.
Mari introduces her subjective stance to the spectator with the following statement: “I believe it’ll be fine if you think it is fine”. This statement, despite its positive tone, underlines the common attempt by subjects to flee into fantasy to avoid the confrontation with their own subjectivity as well as the subjectivity of the Other – the hollow kernel of subjectivity around which signifiers of intra- and inter personal conflict swirl around. This vain flight into positivity is echoed within her attempts to establish something that could resemble a sexual relationship with Koichi and her refusal to meet Buddha – and the unvocalized truth he carries around.
The frustrations that mark her relationship with Koichi are, in this sense, a consequence of her inability to establish a relational fantasy of harmony with him: his subjectivity resists. Koichi does not merely fail to commit to the shared fantasy she wishes to realize – he lacks desire, but refuses her attempts because he feels Mari is trying to shape him into Buddha. The mere confrontation with Buddha’s speaking body only amplifies his conflicted position and revives the transgressive desire implicated in the events of that evening.
One could say that both Koichi and Mari, due to the infraction of loss, inhabit a relational space where the writability of a sexual relationship presents itself as a disappearing fata morgana. Buddha, on the other hand, personifies the flight from subjectivity, the contemporary struggle to explore what does not fit, what does not let itself be erased by sharing laughter at the level of the imaginary. Yet, as Buddha’s new girlfriend implies, such flight can, in certain situations, be the only way to rescue oneself and ensure one’s frail stability as ego.
In her composition, Yui Kusakari relies on long takes that thoughtfully balance dynamism (shaky and fluid, spatial and tracking, handy-cam sequences) and static moments to give the unfolding of her narrative a naturalistic feel, a deceptive sense as if she, intruding with his camera, merely captures the narrative from a pre-existing reality (Cine-note 1). We partake, thanks to Kusakari’s restraint in using the cut, in mundane moments of daily life, in moments that, through their mundane quality, reach behind the mendacious image of relational harmony.
Of course, Kusakari’s stylistic approach functions as an intervention that creates fiction, produces narrative. It establishes a fictional frame that invites the spectator, by feeling the presence of the camera, to infuse a sense of authenticity into all that appears within the frame – emotions, speech-interactions, acts and so on. Luckily, as Kusakari is able to rely on a talented cast to bring the naturalistic conversational flow to life, the spectator has not trouble in accepting this stylistic deceit and install that sense of an external reality being present.
At the level of the sound – whether intended or not, Kusakari also signals what we call the presence of the camera. In the opening sequence, for instance, the clash between wind and microphone forms an integral part of the sound-scape. In other sequences, while more subtle, one can also hear the presence of the camera. Some will surely argue that such ‘auditive left-over’ is merely due to budget-constraints, yet it is precisely because it is a remainder that this sound supports the indirect staging of the presence of an external reality.
The effect of the auditive remainder notwithstanding, we can easily see that Kusakari approaches sound thoughtfully and seeks to utilize the minimalistic sound-scapes to subtly echo the thematical fabric of his narrative. Kusakari relies on narrative spaces that are, by definition, sparse in sounds (e.g. bird-sounds, dull sound of cars passing, …etc), spaces undone of auditive excess, places defined by silence. By relying on such auditive sparseness, Kusakari does not merely infuse a sense of desolateness into her naturalistic atmosphere – a space strained of hope, but also signals, by creating contrasts between diegetic minimalism and speech, the solitude that echoes within the enunciations and in the silences between enunciated signifiers – a subjective hollowness that speaks, and keeps on speaking, but is not received by the other.
Yui Kusakari’s choice to frame his narrative with a square aspect-ratio helps him in utilizing the static shot to deliver elegant and visually appealing shot-compositions – thoughtful plays with compositional lines (e.g. frames within frames, …). He does not also prove that he has a refined sense for composition, but successfully creates moments that underline the poetic quality of the mundane, of the field of alienation – the poetic beauty hidden in the reality that surrounds and embraces us.
With Long Night, Yui Kusakari delivers a self-assured debut, wielding the filmic frame to stage the alienation of the contemporary subject, the failure of imaginary fictions, and the disruptive effect of avoiding Otherness, one’s own as well as the Otherness of the other subject. Kusakari’s Long Night is a question in a filmic form and ask audiences to explore how we, as society, can answer that what does not fit: subjectivity.
Notes
Cine-note 1: The shaky framing that marks the opening shots, the long takes, of The Long Night is enough to establish the sensible presence of the camera. The subsequent turn to fluid dynamism does not erase this sense – the long take, by emphasizing the moving presence of the subject within the space, continues to signal the frame of ‘external reality’.