When Izuru Narushima first received the offer to adapt Sonoko Machida’s award-winning novel, he seriously considered to turn it down; he did not see how he could translate the complexity of the novel into a two-hour movie (えひめのあぷり編集部, 2024; (TAIYO KIKAKU Co., Ltd., 2023).
However, thanks to the intervention of producer Kazuhiro Yokoya, Narushima took on the challenge to bring this complex tale of abuse, young carers, transgender identity alive on the silver screen. While Sonoko Machida was moved to tears during the preview screening, the way he ‘melodramatically solves’ the problem of the novel’s density and the subjective complexity of one’s call for love not being heard within the Other will alienate many spectators.
Narushima opens 52-Hertz Whales by introducing the spectator to Kiko Mishima (Hana Sugisaki), a young woman who fled from Tokyo and took up residence in her grandmother’s house near Beppu bay. One afternoon, while sitting on the sea-wall, the weather suddenly takes a turn for the worst. As the rain starts pouring down, she sets off home only to collapse on the concrete some meters away due to a sudden surge of pain – she whispers but one single signifier: An-san (Jun Shison).
Much to her surprise, someone approaches her with an umbrella. It is a young child (Tori Kuwana) with bruises on her arms. Despite Mishima’s repeated attempts to start a conversation, he remains silent. While he does accept, without saying a word, Mishima’s invitation to visit her house, he flees the house when Mishima discovers more bruising on his back and re-attempts to make him speak.
The narrative structure of 52-Hertz Whales is quite simple. Narushima utilizes the encounter between Kiko Mishima and boy to make, in the first half of the film, the dire situation of the mute neglected boy explicit and, at the same time, arouse the spectator’s interest in Kiko’s past and how it animates her present choices. In the second half, Narushima seeks to satisfy the spectator’s interest by plunging the spectator in Kiko’s past.
That the situation of the boy is dire is emphasized when Kiko questions Kotomi (Nanase Nishino), the child’s mother, about him: she immediately tries to deny his existence. This denial makes the way she treats him brutally explicit. Does she not unintentionally signal that she seeks to radically deny him his symbolic existence? This interpretation invites audiences to wonder what kind of subjective tangle animates Kotomi’s verbal and physical brutality towards her son. What warrants, within her mind, the continuous punishment of her son for merely existing?
Within the first half of the narrative, Narushima also highlights what compels Kiko to seek the boy out – asking Muranaka (Diachi Kaneko) about him and even confronting the mother. It is not simply the bruising on his body as such, but the fact that the inscriptions of abuse, accentuated by Kotomi’s shocking signifiers, re-activate the memory traces to her own past abuse at the hands of her stepfather and mother and the isolation she was forced into by her motherly figure to care for her stepfather after he became bedridden. Yet, what remains somewhat elusive in this first half of the film is Kiko’S aim: What does she hope to ‘cause’ by interacting with him?
The sound of 52 Hertz Whale, introduced by Kiko to the boy, is of central importance. Mishima does not merely introduce her coping mechanism – “When I feel lonely, to the point of dying …” – but also calls forth the image that symbolizes her own past position as well as represents the position of the boy – a whale whose singing – “save me!” – cannot reach the others and, thus, lives an incredible lonely existence within the vast societal ocean. By representing both herself as the boy as 52 hertz whales, she reveals that she can be the address for the boy’s ‘singing’, the crying no one else is able to hear, the crying that remains literally and figuratively unheard within the Other. She can position herself as his address because she had the same life-saving experience, a voice reaching out at the very moment she has about the realize the mother’s demand: “You should die”.
At another level, the message of the 52 Hertz Whale concerns nothing other than love: the desire to be loved. Acts and signifiers aim to elicit the sign of the (m)Other’s love. Yet, in Kiko’s case, the only thing her ‘voice’, her call for love, brings forth are acts of violence and dismissive signifiers; instead of receiving signs of love, subtle affirmations of the importance of her symbolic existence to the Other, she is subjected to a violence that undercuts her symbolic existence and reduces her to an object of ‘familial’ trash. In the case of the boy, Kotomi outright states that he is not only the source of her suffering, of her life becoming a mess, but that she considers him as nothing more than a bug. The symbolic effacing she subjects him to through signifiers and act is so radical that she even forgot his name.
In the lengthy flashbacks in the second half of the narrative, Narushima traces out Kiko’s trajectory from being saved by An-san, the tragic events that transpired in Tokyo, until her flight from Tokyo. These flashbacks do not only allow the spectator to understand why Kiko fled from Tokyo and why her bond with An-san unfurled, but also solve the riddle of her choice to care for the isolated and abused boy. Not surprisingly, all these questions find their answer in the dimension of love/being loved.
Narushima, by relying on long takes and fluidly combining static moments and composed wave-like dynamism gives his composition a restraint visual flow, a flow that respectfully supports the interactional moments, the circulation of the signifier between subjects. Narushima also seeks to keep his visual fabric flowing, relying on dynamism to smoothen shot-transitions. To smoothen transitions from past to present, he sometimes relies on repetition of signifiers – e.g. the lyrics of The Blue Hearts’ Linda, Linda, Linda. Such choice, moreover, helps the director to evoke the way the past flow in and out the mind of his protagonist, Kotomi (Cine-note 1).
Yet, what further heighten the visual pleasure of the composition is the way he, in bringing these interactional moments to life, always plays with compositional lines in a thoughtful way. Narushima succeeds in crafting a frame that is able to let interactions and emotional expressions, fuelled by the natural performances, come to their full right and deliver visual elegance, moments of understated visual beauty.
The subtly faded colour-schemes, the somewhat muted vivacity of the colours and the patches of dark shadows within the frame, infuses a subtle mood into the overall atmosphere. We are, at the level of the lighting-design and colour-schemes, reminded that Mishima is unable to fully appreciate the environmental warmth and fails to let the ‘warmth’ of the Other, as she interacts with others, brighten up her psyche because of her past relational events (e.g. being abandoned by An-san, her past abuse by her mother and stepfather, …) continue to affect her; she is still plagued by wounds that are in dire need of better suturing.
Musical accompaniment within 52-Hertz Whales is not only utilized by Narushima to fluidly coincide with the flow within his composition, but also to prepare the spectator for the drama that will follow and to guide the heartwarming as well as heartrending moments – touching acts and enunciations contrasted with the drama of the lack thereof. One could even argue that, in many cases, the music either primes the spectator for the coming concatenation of dramatic moments or seek to amplify the emotional reverberations of certain dramatic revelations; The musical pieces sway the subject-spectator, rendering him more receptive for the emotional dimension of certain dramatic moments (the confrontational depiction of the abuse) and certain enunciations (e.g. “So, why did you leave me and go away alone?”).
However, Narushima’s overreliance on music also ‘pushes’ the spectator a little bit too much. The director does not only play a dangerous game with melodramatic excess, but also endangers to musically wash away the genuineness of the performances (Narra-note 1). Or to put it differently, Narushima’s wish to amplify the impact of the rapidly concatenating dramatic moments with music gives birth to a subtle yet sensible melodramatic excess that, strange as it seems, diminishes the impact of the natural performances. In our view, music is over-utilized to cover up the fact that Narushima is unable – He does not have time enough – to let his performances properly breathe.
With 52-Hertz Whales, Narushima unfolds a touching metaphor concerning the radical solitude a subject can feel within the societal Other and the difficulty of finding, within this societal sea, someone to hear one’s silent call for love, yet drowns the impact of this beautifully evocative image with melodramatic excess. While there will be spectators’ who will have no trouble in letting themselves float on the film’s ‘stormy’ emotional flow from start to finish, the over-reliance on music in the second half of the film creates a melodramatic whirlpool that will leave many spectators emotionally stranded. Narushima energizes the many dramatic turns within his narrative, yet at the same time he sabotages, not without subtlety, the spectator’s ability to truly experience the emotional and subjective repercussions of the events – something expressed, first and foremost, through the performances. The melodramatic excess will alienate many, leaving them silently wishing that the film would just end.
Notes
Cine-note 1: For certain flashbacks, Narushima relies on a more formal way to signal the shift in time: a title card (e.g. Three years ago, two years ago).
The first flashback depicts the way she, as 52 Hertz whale, found an address for her suffering in Ango Okada or An-san. The second shifts between An-san and Kiko’s perspective to stage the unsaid reality that he refused to bring into play within their bond and, thus, lies at the root of his sudden flight.
Narra-note 1: One of the most ‘devious’ melodramatic traps within the narrative are the scenes that visualize the absent address of Kiko’s speech as physical presence. These moments, which obviously aim to make audiences shed some tears, miss the very dynamic that causes her subjective turmoil: the radical absence of An-san to address her signifiers to, she must carry the burden of her unsaid.
Her choice with regards to the boy is, in this sense, an elaborative response to what transpired between her and An-san.
References:
えひめのあぷり編集部. (2024, February 14). 【注目】映画『52ヘルツのクジラたち』公開前に成島出監督にインタビュー. えぷりweb. https://ehime-epuri.jp/36773
TAIYO KIKAKU Co., Ltd. (2023, December 8). 『52ヘルツのクジラたち』成島出監督 映画は寄り添い共有することが出来る【Director’s Interview Vol.390】|CINEMORE(シネモア). https://cinemore.jp/jp/news-feature/3376/article_p1.html