Ainsi Va La Vie (2019)
A portrait of three women striving to forge their own rosy paths.
The film was produced in 2019 by Nobuhiro Suwa as an commercial for a cosmetics brand called ALBION. It was once on YouTube, but now the link is down Read More »
Quote:
The romantic pretensions of Hollywood to the contrary, love is a very messy business. After all, the other person is a completely separate being, whose independent thoughts, feelings, and experiences cannot be accessed immediately through ESP, whose very actions must always be interpreted through the unreliable filter of subjective impressions. One wonders if we ever really do get to know our lovers. Read More »
Synopsis
When Yuki finds out that her parents are separating and she is moving to Japan with her mother, she and her best friend Nina devise ways to reunite the feuding adults. Read More »
Review
A really wonderful and visceral pseudo-documentary with a distinctly Japanese twist. The film follows a boyfriend/girlfriend duo
through a tumultuous period in their lives: the boy is an underachieving actor who wants to sleep all day, the girl is a depressed
shop assistant. The film does a wonderful job of painting deep and complex characters without making anything too overstated. The
characters barely talk to each other about their deteriorating mental states, instead talking to an unseen narrator about what they
hint at with their actions. The whole fly-on-the-wall approach gives the movie an underlying tone of profound alienation and shows
rather than tells the audience the negative consequences of the emotionally repression that’s unfortunately so common in Japan.
Viewers without firsthand experience of Japan might find something lacking, but everyone I know who’s lived in Japan has thought
the characterizations were eeriely accurate. Definitely worth the effort to track down. Read More »