Eiji Uchida has, ever since its break-out films Lowlife Love (2016) and Love and Other Cults (2017), created a steady number of films in various genres. Despite not receiving the acclaim of some of his contemporaries, he has become a household-name in Japanese cinema.

Uchida has always sought to stage his own particular interpretation of the Japanese field, reaching behind the deceptive fantasy of a harmonious societal field to give the stage to those who are silenced and radically left behind. Night Flower, written and directed by Uchida, is no different.

Despite fleeing to Tokyo with her two children, Koharu (Yumi Watase) and Kotaro (Yudai Kato), Natsuki Nagashima (Keiko Kitagawa) remains in the claws of debt-collectors. She works hard at various places – as a hostess at a snack-bar, a part-timer at a globe manufacturer, and as a cleaner at a hotel, she does not succeed in making ends meet.

One night, after being forced to drink at the snack-bar, she sets out towards home, drunk on her bicycle. Stopping on the street to puke, she happens to witness a drugs-deal and the subsequent robbery of the dealer. Upon checking the lifeless body of the dealer, her eye catches two bags of MDMA pills. She takes them and flees the scene. 

One night, after getting the sack at her part-time job for attacking her demeaning superior, she decides to go on the street to sell the bags of drugs. Sadly, things do not go as planned as she, after selling her first bag, is brutally attacked by yakuza that control the area. She is found by Yoshie Tamae (Misato Morita), a boxer slash escort, who, after realizing Natsuki’s dire situation, suddenly proposes to work together and split the earning equally. She asks Kai (Daisuke Sakuma), the guy who runs the escort business, to introduce them to Mr. Sato (Ryuta Shibuya), the boss of an illicit drugs lab. Yet, despite things starting off well, a concatenation of disasters lurks around the corner.

The critical dimension of Night Flower lies in what remains absent: the lack of a structural response to the societal reality of poverty. The Japanese Other has bred an atmosphere – valuing self-reliance, instilling fear of burdening Others, dismissive discourses concerning personal failure and ‘leeching’ tax-money – where the subject is led into a calculative maze of bureaucratic rules where her genuine demand for public assistance at the city hall is slowly strangled. We can introduce Eiji Uchida’s societal critical touch, the way the Other fails those in need, by formulating the following question: How is it possible that the Other, by coldly adhering to its bureaucratic rules, evades and even expels the confrontation with subjective suffering and makes the turn to illegal activities a promising option?   

The dismissive attitude of the Other, fuelled by discourse that societal failure is one’s own responsibility, one’s own failure to ‘capitalize’ on one’s given chances, is also personified by Natsuki’s superior at the globe manufacturer. He turns every mistake she makes into proof that she, as a subject, is a failure. Her outburst on the work-place, instigated by his dismissive remark that her children will be cut from the same cloth, emphasizes that the signifier mother is the signifier that orient her as ego within the societal field.    

In fact, all of Natsuki’s actions signal that she, despite the societal ‘counter currents’, is trying to be a mother worthy of the signifier. She addresses the civil Other not to expose her own personal failure, but to avoid failing as a mother with respect to her children. For Natsuki, nothing is more important than to realize, as best as she can, the motherly image that the Japanese Other imposes and her children demand. As she has assumed to signifier mother as her sole societal anchor, the stability of her ego – a sense of self-worth – is directly linked with what her children explicitly and implicitly reflect back to her concerning her motherly position.  

The narrative revelation that Natsuki’s daughter plays the violin on the street to gather some money for the family proves, in our view, two things: Koharu has perceived the struggle of the female subject she calls mother and she harbour a silent hope for her to be able to be the mother she wishes to be for her and her younger brother.    

Night Flower is, in essence, a drama of motherhood. The narrative’s dramatic flow is built around the question of whether Natsuki can, despite the plunge in illegality, retain her motherly position or not. To put differently, can Natsuki, having entered a space of brutal jouissance and volatile relational dynamics centred on money, find a way out and protect her motherhood? Uchida gives, with his finale, an answer that, luckily, does right to the genuineness of Natsuki’s motherly feelings.  

The trajectory of Sakura (Nanami Taki) develops the failure of Other in a different manner. Sakura’s willingness to be financially exploited by her so-called friends to acquire drugs functions as a sign that something with respect to the parental Other disfunctions. What disfunctions becomes apparent by analysing the relational dynamic between her mother (Rena Tanaka) and her father. Sakura’s father realizes himself within the familial space as the cold commanding law that erases all other subjective voices. The fiction of familial patriarchal peace is founded on his voice, on the commands he utters, yet this image hides a tragedy of subjective erasure and frustration.      

     

Eiji Uchida delivers a composition that deeply respects the subjects that he portrays. He blends dynamism and static shots together in such a way that the frame is always in function of visually evoking or amplifying the character’s subjective position – a position that slips through the way they enunciate signifiers or how their bodily presence and facial expressions react to signifiers enunciated by others. 

Around the middle of the narrative, Uchida starts interweaving restraint dynamic moments within his composition. He utilizes this kind of dynamism to signal, in a similar way in which horror-directors do, the imminent nature of a tragedy, a tragedy of jouissance.

That Natsuki’s turn to drugs-dealing is not the ‘solution’ that enables her to clothe herself with the image of the mother she desires to be – the image of the mother imposed by the Other, is made evident by the colour- and lighting design. The fact that darkish shadows and faded colours reign within Uchida’s imagery throughout the narrative do not merely evoke the shadow the demeaning Other throws on Natsuki but also elegantly emphasize that there is no hope to be found in the act of dealing drugs – what lies in wait is more struggle (Colour-note 1).    

Uchida elegantly re-emphasizes that fact that tragedy can strike at any time – Natsuki and Tamae are playing with fire – by decorating certain sequences with subtle ominous musical accompaniment. The interweaving of violin-pieces into the unfolding of Night Flower adds a certain beauty to the brutal wilting that endangers that what is trying to blossom.  

While Uchida provides a highly effective visual and auditive envelope, this envelope would not be so effective without great acting performances. Keiko Kitagawa infuses a true genuine feel into the motherly logic of her character – a performance that culminates in very emotionally satisfying ending. Misato Morita, on the other hand, pleases the spectator with the staging of cruder kind of femininity – a staging that delineates the father as a mere position.   

Night Flower offers a highly moving drama of motherhood. However, with his narrative, Uchida does not merely show how far a female subject would go to do right to the signifier mother, but also traces out how a societal field can push against subjects trying to adhere to the discourses of motherhood they have been subjected to. Recommended.  

Notes

General-note 1: The sequence in the city hall exposes both the Other’s dismissive discourse around governmental financial support – Freeloaders! – as well as the way representatives of the Other, by strictly relying in bureaucratic rules, render themselves mute to the struggle of the subject. The woman behind the desk, despite hearing her signifiers of suffering, reduces the subject into an object of bureaucratic calculations – computer says ‘no’.

Narra-note 1: In a certain way, Tamae starts functioning as a father within Natsuki’s family. However, one should not confuse this statement with the sensible manliness that marks Tamae’s subjective presence.  

Colour-note 1: The few moments within the composition where warmish colours enter the frame are, in this sense, but mere embers of hope and could even be interpreted as indirect reminders that the oppressive shadowy darkness – darkness of the Other and the disruptive infraction of tragedy – is laying in wait to extinguish the fleeting flickering warmth. Even in the warmest moments, the shadows of an approaching tragedy cling to Natsuki and her children.  

One can formulate the dramatic question that pushes the narrative forward in terms of lighting: Can Natsuki and Tamae find a way to shake off the ‘societal’ shadows that plague them and secure a little warm fire of hope for themselves?

Acting-note 1: We must, however, note that some fighting sequences lack some sense of reality – the punches do not connect. While these moments threaten to take the spectator out of the narrative, the darkish visual frame keeps them within the narrative.