Some creative projects intuitively surface in directors’ minds; the unconscious producing phantasmatic ideas that impose themselves on the subject, ideas that demand, in the here and now, creative elaboration. For Kenichi Ugana, an idea surrounding his own father-and-daughter relationship created such subjective necessity, resulted in a film that he, for personal reasons, had to make. Ugana’s film explores, unsurprisingly, the complicated bond between a father (Haruki Itabashi) and his daughter (Reika Matsubara).
Kenichi Ugana’s Oscillation plays heavily with visual repetition, offering a concatenation of mundane scenes – e.g. father and daughter sharing breakfast or dinner, father doing menial tasks at work, daughter at the bar she works. As the narrative exploits visual repetition, the spectator is not only imprisoned in the ‘meaningless’ repetition that defines the daily routine of the main characters, but also primed to seek and uncover subtle shifts, little differences, as similar scenes continue to concatenate.
The spectator clings to the dimension of difference and expects it, for better or worse, to happen at any moment. Ugana playfully exploits the expectations he carefully engendered at the level of his composition. He cuts away when something is about to happen, something that overturn the mere mundane. He suddenly inserts a different situation – e.g. the father at the clothing-shop – which, despite offers a sudden flash of narrative variation, easily nests itself within the pattern of mundane repetition.
However, as the mundane moments continue to concatenate, the spectator quickly realizes that the relational dynamic between the father and his daughter approaches a kind of hollow repetition. The father does not only exhibit a reluctance to address her, but she cuts any exchange of signifiers short with her cold responses – silence over speech, speech is sparse within Ugana’s film.
Then, suddenly, the ominous change awaited by the spectator introduces itself: the father finds, as he washes his face in the morning, a strange pimple-like injury on his cheek. This pimple-like presence, by virtue of rapid or rabid deterioration, turns into a stain that disrupts the mundanity of the daily repetition; its ‘otherworldliness’ complicates the functioning of the mundane. The spectator realizes that the ‘worst’ is happening, yet is unable to grasp what kind of shape this horrendous finality will take.
Ugana, however, does not only shatter the repetition of the mundane – the daily rhythm of the father and his daughter’s life lies in tatters, but replaces it with a more harrowing kind of repetition. He subverts the element of visual repetition so that it serves the shattering of the mundane, so that it pulls the spectator into a space of horrifying uneasiness.
While the daughter tries to return to the repetition of the mundane, ignoring his existence and letting him – and the stain he represents – dwell within his room, the spectator surmises that the very horror that befalls the father is function of the relational malfunctioning, of the failure to pacify the isolating weight of silence and weaving together some kind of imaginary understanding. Small moments of happiness (i.e. making breakfast for each other) provide some meaning for the subject, yet are unable to counter the absence of an enunciated circulation of meaningful signifiers.
At a psychological level, we easily see that the father’s suffering consists of two phases. The initial phase of writhing in bed constitutes an appeal that the daughter ignores – an appeal for signifiers, an appeal for verbal signs of love. The refusal of accepting his suffering as an appeal ultimately causes a wet and rather grotesque return of the repressed: that what cannot be said splatters all over her.
Ugana, in a certain way, frames the failure of establishing some kind of understanding not only as the source of relational and subjective suffering but as that what is worse than the end of the (external) world – Sekai no Owari Yori. Yet, many spectators will grasp that such failure is, at a socio-political level, what threatens the world with its own end.
The way Ugana composes Oscillation is quite minimalistic – relying on a concatenation of monochrome static shots and, here and there, a long take. What makes Ugana’s composition interesting is the effective way he utilizes music and manipulates sound-scapes.
Ugana perverts the mundane quality of his visuals by transforming spatial silence into an oppressive and threatening audible presence. By introducing such an aural excess and by signalling the presence of a threat that remains unperceived by the characters, the director arouses a sense of anxious anticipation into the spectator: what kind of horror will manifest itself?
After the introduction of the title, the threatening musical piece quickly fades away, giving way far more naturalistic sound-scapes. However, by making these sound-scapes a tad too present and by playing with aural repetition, Ugana succeeds in making the unfathomable dimension of inaugural musical piece cling to the spectator: a small quantum of uneasiness is kept lingering within him.
Of course, Ugana lies in wait to disrupt these sound-scapes by decorating certain moments (e.g. the father looking at the buckets) with ominous and puzzling electronic sounds and by letting threatening music temporarily seize control over the atmospheric dimension. Surprisingly, the director succeeds in utilizing music to add a dash of emotionality to certain estranging moments – e.g. the birthday sequence, the initial suffering that accompanies the ominous growth on his face.
Oscillation appears, at first glance, a simple minimalistic body-horror. Yet, upon granting Kenichi Ugana’s film second glance, the spectator perceives the subtle way in which the director puts the contemporary frailty of social bonds into question, casting as that what, for the subject and the social field, brings forth the end of the world. Recommended viewing.
