M/Other

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Here is my review from several months ago:

Title: M/Other
Directed by Nobuhiro Suwa
Starring:  Tomokazu Miura, Makiko Watanabe, Ryudai Takahashi
Rating: ****1/2

	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 like in 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.
	This becomes an even more pressing issue in contemporary Japan.  With a 
spate of recent crimes prompting some to question whether young Japanese 
can  truly recognize the humanity--the existence even--of other people, a 
number of recent films, from Shinji Aoyama's Shady Grove to Kiyoshi 
Kurosawa's upcoming Barren Illusion, have taken the romantic couple as 
the testing ground for exploring human relationships in an age of social 
crisis.
	 Nobuhiro Suwa, as the title of his new film, M/Other, indicates, has 
made relationships with an Other--the contradictory interplay between 
intimacy and Otherness--a focal point for his filmmaking.  Yet whereas 
Aoyama and Kurosawa have addressed the issue with films tending towards 
allegory, Suwa has resolutely maintained a documentary stance.
	His debut film, 2/Duo, in fact, traced the rocky relationship between a 
young man and woman without using a script: Suwa just explained the story 
outline and let the actors come up with the lines on their own, speaking 
from their own real feelings.  As if to investigate what they were doing, 
he even "interviewed" their characters on screen.
	M/Other, which won the FIPRESCI critics prize at this year's Cannes Film 
Festival, continues this experiment, but in a more powerful and 
accomplished form.
	For a two-and-a-half-hour film, the story is deceptively simple: Tetsuro 
(Tomokazu Miura), a divorced restauranteur who is living with a designer 
named Aki (Makiko Watanabe), one day suddenly brings home his son 
Shunsuke (Ryudai Takahashi).  His ex-wife, it turns out, has had a 
traffic accident and asked him to take care of the boy until she leaves 
the hospital.  However, the fact Tetsuro not only failed to consult with 
Aki beforehand, but afterwards tends to assume she will take charge of 
Shunsuke, in spite of her own busy work schedule, creates a rift between 
the two that eventually prompts Aki to leave.
	This is the basic framework of the story, but how it got this way and 
where it proceeds from there was largely left up to the actors.  Suwa's 
original plot idea (printed in the press materials) was quite 
different--it focused on the three-way relationship between the man, the 
woman, and the ex-wife--and thus it was the discussions between the 
director and the performers, and their improvisations, that produced the 
story we see.  There is no script credit here: all that is given at the 
end is "Story: Nobuhiro Suwa, Tomokazu Miura, Makiko Watanabe."
	Miura and Watanabe thus have much more of an investment in this film 
than your average actor, and this is evident on screen.  Like the 
performers in 2/Duo, they don't necessarily produce the most impressive 
dialogue, but their sometimes faltering, ineloquent words well-up from 
inside in a way impossible in a scripted film.  What they do is not 
predetermined: in fact, the ambiguous ending invites us, the audience, to 
give our input in how things turn out.
	To maintain the realistic tone, the camera, manned by Masami Inomoto, a 
veteran of documentary productions, maintains a distance, shooting the 
actors in long takes and often in long shots.  It is not as emotionally 
involved as Masaki Tamura's camera in 2/Duo, but Inomoto's more polished 
reticence effectively melds with one of the film's major concerns: the 
problem of trying to get to know another person.
	Whereas 2/Duo relied on interviews to probe feelings the characters were 
unwilling to tell to others, M/Other reminds us there are no such easy 
avenues in real life.  The film thus operates on the complicated 
interplay between what is known and what is not known, what is said and 
what is not said, what is seen and what is not seen.
	Much of this brilliantly revolves around the question of space in this 
very architectural film.  In a case of good fortune, M/Other was shot in 
a real house constructed in the International Style, with windows almost 
everywhere--even between rooms.  While some rooms offer characters the 
opportunity to hide, others provide no privacy at all, a spatial 
characteristic that comes to embody the difficulty Aki faces in this 
relationship.  She wants privacy, a space to work and live on her own, 
but Tetsuro, especially by bringing in Shunsuke, keeps invading every 
corner of her life.
	Thus while most of his contemporaries try to know the Other in order to 
confirm the social self, Suwa realizes that in relationships we must also 
give our others the freedom not to be known.  We may demand of our lovers 
an intimacy like that with our mothers, but they are--and must 
remain--forever Other.