Kota Nakano’s Retake (2023), winner of the Grand Prize at the 2023 Pia Film Festival, grew out of a confrontation with the seriousness by which the young people (e.g. Urara) in his high-school video expression class took their assignment and the way they (tried to) overcame the obstacles they faced on their path. His film, however, does not merely fictionalize his own past experiences with young people as a teacher, but utilizes these experiences to celebrate the youthful drive to create – a drive that made him think, “I have to make a film too!”, and, ultimately, led to the creation of his film (映画チア部大阪支部, 2025).
Nakano’s narrative commences when Yu Mizuguchi (Urara), dancing and singing without worries, happens to catch Kei Sekino (Yuta Muto) photographing her from a nearby bridge. While Kei tries to counter his embarrassment by telling her he will delete the ‘voyeuristic’ footage of her, Yu is more interested in the potential of the camera for filming. She tells him she wants to make a film during the summer and promptly invites him to be her camera-man.
She hopes to make a film about a boy and girl who travel to a world where time does not flow, an elaboration of her fear for the flowing of time, of having no control over changing relational dynamics and the fleeting nature of thoughts. Kei introduces Jiro (Ryusei Chiba) to Yu, who promptly reveals he will be the male protagonist. Yu, on the other hand, asked Umi Hashimoto (Nako Ohara), her junior who played drums in the Light Music club together with her, to play the female protagonist.
With Retake, Nakano delivers a narrative about obstacles. While the element of filmmaking is integral to the narrative and its structure (see below), the true focus of the narratives lies on common obstacles youths encounter on their path of their coming-into-being – external obstacles to their wish (e.g. the lack of a dedicated (boom) microphone to counteract the muffling and intrusive effects of diegetic sounds, conceptualizing a fitting ending for their filmic narrative), interpersonal knots left tangled, and inner obstacles that hinder speech and acts (i.e. the blossoming of romantic feelings) – and the way the act of creation aids in resolving subjective hurdles and unresolved interpersonal tensions.
The spectator is introduced to the central theme of the narrative in the second conversation between Yu and Kei. We can discern in the vagueness that defines Yu’s speech surrounding her retirement from the Light Music Club and her subsequent flight from school – skipping school, that she is about to formulate the truth of her subjective trajectory in the narrative she wants to turn into a filmic fantasy. She seeks to elaborate, consciously or unconsciously, her inner conflict in an attempt to formulate a pleasurable phantasmatic solution. Yet, as implied in our previous paragraph, the solution might present itself in the collaborative act of creation as such.
It is also important to highlight that both Jiro and Umi are marked by a form of subjective indetermination, a lack of orienting desire. Jiro, while having lined up a job, has no concrete plans to ‘enjoy’ the last summer of his high-school life. Umi, on the other hand, has no idea what she wants to do with her free time. This emptiness is, once more, echoed when she tells Jiro that the only reason why she joined the creation of the Yu’s film is because she was ‘ordered’ by her.
The element of inter-personal disaccord rises up within the narrative when Kei invites Allie (Aleina Takano), a member of the light music club, to join the collaborative project of making a summer film. What he, at the moment he extends his invitation, does not know that there is an unresolved tension between her and Yu and Umi, who both quit the club the year before. With this narrative thread, Kota Nakano puts the emphasis on the dimension of the unsaid, as one of the main motors of interpersonal conflicts and tensions. Nakano beautifully shows that, more than anything, it is the unsaid that, as undercurrent, shapes interactions. It disrupts enunciations, initiate flights from signifiers – from conflicts and tensions, inaugurates non-productive relational silence.
The twist of the film, signalled by the title of Nakano’s film, is that the spectator is not given only one version of the story, but also various partial rewritings – the seventh take constitutes the finale, the conclusion. We slowly come to realize that we are not merely watching a film within the film, but a film within a film within a film. This playful structure, which only realizes itself in the latter half of the narrative, allows Nakano to trace out the productive effect of the enunciated signifier, the subjective and relational reverberations of an enunciation in a moment where before only silence was, as well as the productive effects of leaving certain things unsaid. Signifiers invites signifiers, speech invites speech, pebbles and rocks that subtly change the stance of the subject and allow the bending of the relational and interactional flow.
Due to Nakano’s play with his narrative structure, he is able to bend his narrative away from the genre of mundane romance to emphasize the importance of spending time in an unhurried way, of circulating pleasure, of relishing the summery atmosphere of seishun, and forming community around a collaborative act of fictitious creation. At another level, Nakano’s playfully echoes Lacan’s statement that truth has the structure of fiction: each subject utilizes the fictional frame to express something of his subjective position, each fictionalized representation of truth sorts effects, our truth is a fictitious performance for the Other.
The composition of Retake stands out due to its restraint visual flow – the film unfolds, in a certain sense, as a small peaceful murmuring river. Nakano elegantly uses a variety of shot-types – close-ups, medium shots, wide-shots, …etc. – and plays successfully with visual repetition.
He also pleases the scopic drive of the spectator by delivering beautiful shots of natural beauty and elegantly interweaving such beauty in the composition of his shots. The visual emphasis on the flowing of water is both evocative of time as a river that murmurs on as well as the failure of recognizing hidden undercurrents under the flow of the relational surface. Yet, at the same time, this emphasis highlights how time, the flow of interactions and circulating signifiers, forms the prerequisite for the formation of romantic bonds and create the possibility for relational repair.
Nakano calls forth the summery atmosphere by his colour-design, which signals the presence of the ‘oppressive’ sun (i.e. yellowish and orangish colours), and the integration of diegetic sounds – the lingering singing of cicadae, the crashing of the waves.
The low-budget nature of Retake is most evident in the photography. While Nakano delivers many visually pleasing moments, he often struggles with balancing exposure and, thus, creates many shots with over-exposed elements, e.g. skies, and something even complicates the spectator’s sense of spatial continuity. One can also surmise the film’s low-budget at the level of some diegetic sound-scapes. Yet, this budgetary roughness does not diminish the spectator’s pleasure.
The performances within Nakano’s Re-take also have to applauded. Yet, one of the reasons why these performances feel so naturalistic is that Kota Nakano wrote his characters around the presence and the personalities of his cast – they deliver genuine performances because they merely play a version of themselves (映画チア部大阪支部, 2025) (Acting-note 1).
Kota Nakano’s Retake offers a heartwarming exploration of time as that what creates the possibility for the signifier, enunciated or left unsaid, to sort reparative effects on the subject and his relations to others. The incredible performances by Nakano’s cast ensures not merely that the budgetary constraints are easily forgotten, but also that his heartfelt message to contemporary youth is able to reach their hearts. In short, recommended.
Notes
Cine-note 1: The series of still photographs beautifully play with the metonymic and metaphoric dimension of language, of concatenating signifiers. While the series of photographs stage, at first, nothing other than beauty in flora and fauna, the sudden linking of Yu into this chain brings his desire on the stage, signals that his desire is captured by her beauty.
Acting-note 1: Of the five cast members, only Yuta Muto had prior acting-experiences. His character, moreover, was the only character Nakano held an open audition for (映画チア部大阪支部 (2025).
References:
映画チア部大阪支部. (2025, January 30). 『Retake リテイク』中野晃太監督インタビュー🎤. note（ノート）. https://note.com/moviecheer_osaka/n/n983e49d7e11d