Eiji Uchida’s Fiamma is one of his latest original projects; he conceived the concept and approached Yukiko Manabe (Romantic Prelude (2009)) to turn his idea into a screenplay. With his latest film, he explores the radical meaning of ‘based on a true story’, signalling that these signifiers imply a double fictionalization.     

One month before the filming of Arisa Ohara’s uplifting autobiography is set the begin, Kosuke Nojima (Yukiya Kitamura), the first AD of up-and-coming director Shohei Osawa (Udai Iwasaki), is hard at work with others to allows the director to bring the story of Arisa (Marui Wan), who escaped her poverty-stricken existence by turning her misery and her experiences as young-carer into an award-winning essay The Last Love Letter, a bestseller and using the life-insurance money of her deceased father into a company, faithfully to life.

One day, while interviewing Arisa’s uncle to get a better picture of who her father was, he learns that the girl’s deceased father has no grave. While Osawa rejects Nojima’s budding doubt concerning the veracity of Arisa’s story – “we tend to see things from our own point of view”, he lets his AD continue his research. Nojima soon discovers other pieces of information that do not only puncture but truly fracture Arisa’s auto-biographical account of her past.

One day, he approaches the producer of the film, Ikumi Tachibana (Reiko Kataoka), to divulge her his discoveries and urges her to do something. He, then, confronts the director. Yet, neither want to cancel this promising project.

To make headway in Uchida’s Fiamma and go beyond the mere opposition between commercial interests of the film industry and the importance of staying true to factual reality, we need to introduce the signifiers lie, reality, and truth. It is only by utilizing these signifiers that the spectator can perceive that the tragic dimension of the narrative lies in the conflation of ‘factual’ reality with subjective truth and how such conflation underpins the erasure of the Other’s subjectivity (General-note 1). With Fiamma, Uchida shows, in an elegant way, that external reality can, in no way, be equated with (subjective) truth. 

Before delving deeper into the narrative, we want to introduce three statements that, by elucidating something of how these terms relate to each other, will allow the spectator understand our reading of the film better. First, reality forms the support for both the subjective lie and the subject’s truth. Secondly, the formal envelope of the lie is necessary for truth to become formulated. Lastly, the subject always leaves traces of his reality because he is caught up within a network of social bonds and is subjected to fleeting encounters.     

Our introductory remarks allow the spectator to grasp that Arisa, by fictionalizing her past – the mendacious reshuffling, erasure, and creation of narrative elements, creates a frame that allows her to divulge fragments of her own subjective truth to the Other; she inaugurated a place for her subjective voice (Narra-note 1). Some statements Arisa makes during a company presentation – “Always be ready to grab any opportunity that comes your way”; “No one can make your dream come true but you” – fit the inspiring fiction she created as well as the slivers of reality that Nojima uncovered by talking to those ‘marked’ by her former presence. Arisa merely fabricated a better fictional stage to allow her subjective voice be heard.    

Uchida goes further and takes the opportunity to emphasize that everyone, in their interactions with others, continuously lies; we lie our ego to the other, yet this protective frame does not stop from faltering and let signals of our truth escape. The silences between Nojima and his wife, his refusals to answer his wife’s questions, and Hikari’s flight from the parental Other signal, all in their own way, the radical gap between the self-image one invokes with one’s speech and the subjectivity one refuses to verbalize. It is in this gap that truth signals its presence, signals the failure of the ego-shield.

Uchida’s exploration of the dysfunctional family dynamics, moreover, highlights how digital anonymity allows the subject to inaugurate a trashcan-like space that allows him/her to address an affirming Other. This trash-can like space can be exploited by the subject to rid him- or herself of thoughts that endanger the stability of the ego-fiction he presents to the Other or to imaginary ‘live’ the ego that is given no place within a certain repressive space, a space of subjective frustration.

The introduction of the three signifiers allows the spectator to see that the tragic dynamic of Uchida’s narrative concerns former-journalist Nojima’s fixation on factual reality, a fixation that causes him to miss what truly counts: subjective truth, the subject’s response to the parental Other that embraces him. Within a societal space that thrives on self-serving fiction and fictionalizing others Nojima conflates truth with reality and, thus, dismisses the fact that the signifier, whether enunciated or written down, merely creates a mendacious envelope to hide from as well as stage our subjective truth.

Nojima’s trajectory within the narrative can be evoked through the following questions: Will he allow his fixation on the reality behind the fiction to sabotage the film-project and endanger the livelihoods of many or will the encounter with Arisa change his subjective course? Where will he place the signifier ‘justice’ with respect to the triad truth, lie, reality?

With Fiamma, Uchida also explores the various ways financial hardship can affect the subject. While this dimension plays a central role within Arisa’s fiction, Uchida explores this effect more directly in his exploration of Nojima’s relation with his daughter Hikari (Manaka Nakagokoro). This thematical thread bursts to the fore when Nojima, as he continues his research into Arisa’s story, happens to encounter his daughter as she applies for a part-time job as a hostess.

In the confrontation that follows – Nojima forbids Hikari to work at such an establishment, Hikari does not merely expose the fatherly castration – “Thanks to you we’ve got no money”, but reveals the radical way consumption dictates her subjective structure, her logic. Hikari’s self-image is not defined by any dream for the future, but by the concatenation of self-satisfying consumptive acts – “It’s totally pointless living this life without money”. Her father’s financial castration plagues her as she, in contrast to her peers, is unable to continuously enjoy – You sacrificed my consumptive pleasures to pursue your pathetic dreams.

It comes to no surprise that Hikari’s financial need is revealed to be linked to her having fallen victim to the consumerisation of the sexual relationship, to the commodification of affection. This revelation emphasizes, once more, that consumerist logic subverts the subject’s desire to feel desired, his desire for signs of the Other’s love. Hosts, thus, do not merely sell shots of fabricated affection, but offer the subject bittersweet signifiers that allow her to fleetingly escape the frustrating reality of lack.

What Nojima misses with respect to his daughter is the very subjective struggle that lingers behind her financial complaint, her flight into the night, spending time with Toyoko kids, and so on. All her acts – these acting-outs – are silent screams of suffering addressed to the (parental) Other, yet unheard by Nojima, who is busy calculating reality, and his meek wife. Yet, in a discussion with Arisa, Nojima takes a minimal step at discovering what he so skilfully failed at: “…, she’s doing a great job at not listening to me”; “I thought I gave her food to eat, a place to live, it might have been very basis, but I did my best”. Can Nojima, who finds himself on the cusp of questioning himself with respect to his daughter, realize that he has not given her any space for her subjectivity (Psycho-note 1)?           

To bring the narrative of Fiamma visually to life, Eiji Uchida relies heavily on dynamism and creating a fluid visual flow. By handling the camera in a way that blends crudeness and elegance – from shaky framing, floaty movement, to crude camera movements, Uchida aims to establish a fictional frame of reality. One could even argue that Uchida seeks to signal the contrast between the reality of filmmaking with the fictionalization by filmmaking. 

In certain sequences, Uchida utilizes dynamism to enable the compositional lines of the scene-composition emphasize that we, just like Nojima, intrude on the unwritten reality carefully hides behind Arisa’s autobiographical fiction. In this sense, Uchida also utilizes his composition to elegantly evoke the contrast between the hidden reality of one’s lived experience and the mendacious quality of the written and spoken signifier – of the way we fictionalize our life in order to present it to the other/Other.    

Eiji Uchida delivers an impressing narrative with Fiamma. With brutal elegance, he develops the idea that physical reality cannot be equated with subjective truth. While reality, by enveloping the subject, plays an integral part in generating his truth, we can only express it to the Other via the mendacious envelope of speech and writing. Yet, is the Other interested in truth? Give Uchida’s Fiamma a watch and make up your own mind.

Notes

General-note 1: Readersshould not assume that we agree with the idea that everyone can have his own truth. What we call subjective truth is what ends up speaking through acts and slips through the cracks in speech. It is, in a sense, the truth the ego does not want to know anything about.

Narra-note 2: Fiamma also critically touches upon the fact that, in the name of marketability, certain facts are refused their rightful presence within the fictionalization, within the narrativization of subjective experience. Arisa is, in this sense, also victim of the fixation on profit within the publication industry.

Uchida, in this sense, contrasts the structural necessity of the lie at the level of the ego with the capitalistic exploitation of the mendacious quality of our ego, the deceitful stabilizing of our ego and the forcing of a deceitful image, a mendacious narrative, to generate as much profit as possible. What Uchida seeks to put into question is not the fictional nature of the ego-frame that allows one’s truth to be fragmentarily vocalized but the morality of the lie within the context of capitalism and profit-seeking.    

Psycho-note 1: We do not want to imply that a mere chance in Nojima’s fatherly stance would have sufficed to break the capitalistic prison his daughter finds herself in – money and love. The difficulty lies in forcing her into space that allows her to question her fixation on money and consumption and reformulate her lack into a different logic than the capitalistic one – the logic of lack, desire, and love.  

One of the first challenges within a contemporary psychoanalytic setting is to puncture the way the capitalistic discourse has deformed subjectivity and complicated the subject’s access to his own unconscious. Fiamma delivers, in this sense, a tragedy of capitalism, of the brutal finality of the commodification of love.