The element of parental failure – either by neglect or via toxicity, is a guiding theme for Aya Igashi. Familial spaces are, often, staged as sites of suffocation, places where subjectivity is not given the right to exist or develop. In many of her films – A Crimson Star (2018), No Call, No Life (2021), the entry of a ‘different’ subject on the narrative stage opens up the possibility of escape. Yet, while the suffocating Other can be left behind, Igashi also points out that one’s neurosis will continue to echo within the subject’s breaths of freedom.
Given Igashi’s thematical inclinations, it comes as no surprise that she was asked to bring Ayano Takeda’s award-winning novel Aisarenakute mo Betsu ni (2020) to life on the silver screen. With this film, which stages the coming-into-being of Hiiro Miyata, Igashi does not merely emphasizes the importance of the encounter – a subject offering a way out – but also highlights the importance for the subject to make choices that do not only change his relational environment but actually rewrites his own symbolic field, the field where he must realize himself as subject.
Igashi’s narrative commences by introducing the spectator to Hiiro Miyata (Sara Minami), a serial energy drink-drinker and energy bars-muncher, as she attends her university classes. Yet, rather than paying attention to what the professor says, she uses this time to calculate the balance between the income of her part-time job as convenience store clerk and her expenses – i.e. her tuition fees and the monetary gifts for her mother. Coming home, she finds her mother, Ai (Aoba Kawai), making merry with her boyfriend Shunya (-).
One night, after hearing something disconcerting from fellow student called Akua Kimura (Miyu Honda) about another classmate and Miyata’s coworker Miyabi Enaga (Fumika Baba), she takes the plunge and asks her whether it is true that her father is a murderer. Surprisingly, due to this simple question, a bond between them starts to blossom. Not much later, Kimura approaches Miyata to help her find a part-time job. Despite the friction that marks their interactions, she introduces her own workplace – but warns her that Miyabi Enaga, the girl she morally despises, works there.
Aya Igashiutilizes her two-part opening sequence to emphasize that Hiiro Miyata’s seclusion is not merely an answer to the financial constraints imposed by her mother, but also a way to avoid the confrontation with her own desire. She holds herself prison in a space of solitude to pay respects to her mother’s love.
Yet, the spectator immediately grasps that Miyata’s sacrifices in function of her mother’s love causes her to offer herself as an object-to-be exploited to the mother. Miyata’s subjective space is ravished by a mother who forces her to mother her (e.g. clean the house, make breakfast, provide money, and so on). Miyata’s mother realizes her first name, ai, as a radical subjective position: to show me love (ai) is to enable me to indulge in my pleasures; to serve me allows me to say aishiteru to you. This play with ai infuses an intriguing equivocality into the film’s title.
The unexpected discovery that her mother kept quiet about her father’s childcare support and that she relied on those funds to sponsor her own lifestyle cracks her image of motherly love – the concatenation of expressions of love – and reflects the exploitative truth of their bond. The motherly signifier of love reveals itself as a manipulative tool to silence the subject and repress the aim of her conduct, her own pleasure and enjoyment.
Miyabi Enaga, on the other hand, is introduced within Love Doesn’t Matter to Me as someone who keeps the Other at bay. By wearing earphones, even while working at the convenience store, she seeks to install a radical distance between herself and others. Yet, what she, actually, seeks to keep at bay is the societal fantasy of happiness and those who, by indulging in complaint about the little obstacles to pleasure in life, support it – “It seems like everyone is unaware of how fortunate they are”. The interactional dynamics of university students, turning around these tiny absences of pleasure and fuelled by the pleasure generated by complaining and comparing, becomes a repressive defence against the Real of trauma, against transgressive jouissance that perversely slithers behind the fiction of harmony, and against (damaged) subjectivity.
What allows Enaga to verbalize something of her exploitative familial situation she fled – her father’s sexual violence and the oppressive motherly demand to prostitute herself – and address something of her subjectivity to Miyata is her radical puncturing of the need to present oneself as happy, as being merely plagued by the mundane flashes of unhappiness – “I don’t think I can understand happy people”.
She signals that Enaga, in her presence, does not need to close herself off from the other’s little misery. In other words, Miyata’s simple yet radical puncturing enables them to speak on a different level than the happy fiction of mundane misery and establish a circulation of more honest and direct signifiers (Narra-note 1).
The minimal bond established between Akua Kimura and Hiiro Miyata, on the other hand, is built on misrecognition. By staging the dramatic turns within their interactions, Igashi underlines that one’s own relation to misfortune often becomes a blinding frame that blocks out the subjective misery of the other subject.
Igashi introduces Akua as a young woman who feels haunted and imprisoned by an overbearing motherly shadow, an oppressively present mother figure – e.g. calling every two hours, coming over every week from Fukuoka and so on. While for Miyata, such overbearing attitude proves Akua’s mother love, she fails to see how such anxious attitude imprisons Akua in the position of the ‘helpless’ child; how her mother tries to reduce her to a controllable object to ease her own anguish and appease her sense of motherliness – “Akua’s life is my life”.
It is her want for radical separation from the mother that pushes her into the arms of cosmo-sama (Yoko Kondo), a ‘fatherly’ cult-leader who, by being in contact with God, provides guidance. However, she does not merely install a ‘fatherly’ third to break the suffocating dual relationship between her and her mother, but also seeks to inserts herself into a radically different familial context – warm and welcoming, a space of belonging (Narra-note 2).
The effect Cosmo sorts on subjects is due her emphasis on acknowledging subjective suffering, exploiting the idea of inherent goodness, and (naively?) positing being loved as the reason for one’s existence – “Parents love their children”. In the case of Miyata, she acknowledges what she has not yet accepted: the suffering caused by her mother’s acts and signifiers. For Enaga, she seeks to puncture her self-indulging shield of misery and reflect the good that she has refused.
Yet, in our view, the meeting between Cosmo-sama and Enaga and Miyata succeeds in establishing a far more uncomfortable truth about the role love plays within subjectivity and the field of interactions. Does Enaga’s retort not expose that Cosmo’s idealized idea of love erases the exploitative dimension that perversely structures love? Love creates dependency, invites manipulation, installs power-imbalances. Love is, moreover, but a jar full of holes – it cannot be filled and the beads within the jug will never be enough. The spectator will have no problem to perceive that this ideological oversight structures Cosmo’s religious or fatherly hold over her followers – her unconditional love installs radical dependency, the concatenation of donations bur mere means to ensure signs of love can be received.
Within her composition, Igashi relies on static shots to interweave still moments of visual beauty – with some shots even attaining a pillow-shot effect – but also to subtly allow the bodies and the voices of her cast breathe life into subjective expressions and the interactional flow (i.e. enunciations separated and embraced by silences) and what disrupts it (i.e. silences echoing misrecognition).
The composition, in other words, is an effective envelope that amplifies the naturalistic structure of the interactions. Igashi, in fact, reveals herself to be very adept at playing with the equivocal reality of silences within the interactional field and knowledgeable about the fact that the body speaks and the circulating exchange of signifiers among subjects turns around misrecognition and forcing the other in the mould of one’s own interpretative schemes – e.g. Miyata’s discussion with Kimura in a classroom at her university.
It is, moreover, evident from her shot-compositions that Igashi aims to obliquely introduce the spectator to the subjective reality of her main characters – a reality determined by the relational network surrounding the character. We are, at the level of the visual fabric, invited to read what speaks but is not said. The use of shaky framing corroborates this; these moments merely seek to reverberate the inner turmoil of characters, to echo the storm that tosses their ego around.
Igashi, moreover, re-affirms this approach at the level of her diegetic sounds – utilizing the framing quality of silence to give certain enunciations and non-verbal noises a sense of evocative intimacy. She doubles down on invoking such intimacy by interweaving close-ups into her compositional fabric (Cine-note 1). Igashi relies on serene musical accompaniment not merely to emphasize a certain temporal continuity, but also to evocatively qualify the subjective state of her main characters and to emphasize moment that are from their perspective important. In the case of Miyata, the music breathes life into the solitude that shown, at a visual level, to define her daily life.
As Igashi crafts a visual and aural envelope that aims to evoke the dimension of subjectivity, the success of this approach depends, more than in other narratives, on the performances of the cast. Luckily, Igasho has a keen eye for acting-talent and chose actresses that have no difficulty in turning silences into echoes of what determines their characters and the signifiers and acts they utter into powerful allusions to the ‘familial’ ravage caused by the past and the present.
With Love Doesn’t Matter To Me, Aya Igashi does not only prove that she is adept in bringing subjectivity to life on the silver screen – in giving her characters an inviting three-dimensionality, but also corroborates that she fully grasps the difficulty for the subject to find within the Other a symbolic place for himself. Through the frame of love, she reveals, in an emotionally subdued manner, that relations can either sites of ravage or sites of support, either hands that suffocate or grant the subject space to breathe. Highly recommended.
Notes
Narra-note 1: One element that is very important for the unfolding of the narrative, to be able to signal the coming-into-being of Hiiro Miyata, concerns her relation to intimacy and sexuality. While Enaga engages within the field of sexuality and intimacy without any emotional investment, Miyata cannot enter this field because the jouissance it arouses is of a disruptive disgusting nature. Her body recoils from sexuality, churns her stomach and forces her to puke – even touching hands with Enaga proves to be disruptive.
The ending, by introducing a shift within Miyata’s relation with intimacy, opposes the vertical structures of love with the horizontal dimension of love/friendship.
Narra-note 2: We must also read Kimura’s choice to attend university in Tokyo as a way to install physical distance between her and her mother.
Cine-note 1: In our view, Aya Igashi does not utilize such visual and auditive intimacy to establish a kind of similarity between spectator and her character, but to emphasize her Otherness and evoke her particular subjective state.