The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue
Identity is such a fragile thing.
If we’re not careful, it can be replaced by what others think of us. And often we try to replace someone else’s identity with what we think of them.
I would have sworn that “The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue” was Yûya Ishii’s first movie. It was human. Bit random. Character-obsessed. Meandering. My impulse was to think it lacked discipline.
Funny, seeing how much I bitch about movies colouring inside someone else’s lines.
Nope. He directed 14 before it, including “The Great Passage”.
Maybe it’s the first one he wrote, then. That must be it! He has been directing, so he has a good grasp on that part, but went nuts on the writing.
Nope. This and seven others.
Alrighty. He knows what he’s doing. I have no idea.
It’s a character piece. That’s a boring, movie-wanker way of saying it’s focused on people.
Its leads are hyper-verbal to hide who they are. Quiet and morose by nature, but words start pouring out to disguise their nervousness when there’s a silence. They lose the social filter as they re-jig it into a personal filter instead.
Once they start admitting who they like — nevermind love — exes come out of the woodwork. They need to figure things out, find out who to put on their blind spot.
She says that loving Tokyo is losing yourself.
Maybe that’s true. The city doesn’t whisper or talk — it screams as a multitude. Maybe if you aren’t sure who you are, and have a tenuous grasp on your own identity, it will drown your inner voice.
Much like being in love.
Being in love is being open, welcoming a different consciousness into your mind, letting someone else change you.
If he makes you feel at peace, that’s going to threaten the part of you that wants to war. If he’s positive about you, you have a harder time justifying your negativity.
So maybe people around you die, or leave, or leave you, or you feel they left you by dying. You wander, you stumble, you bitch.
But Tokyo is a character too. Its millions of voices hide its own identity. So you decide to try once again, and hold your breath, and scrunch your eyes closed, and open your arms, and let the other turn you into someone else.
And then it ends like this:
And it feels like Tokyo.
Ganbaru!
Originally published at filmsnark.tumblr.com.
