On Sunday night, Natsuka Kusano won the Nippon
Visions Jury Award at Nippon Connection 2014 for her debut feature Antonym (螺旋銀河/Rasen Ginga, 2014). This is high praise indeed for the
international jury consisted of Alex Zahlten,
assistant professor at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard,
Alex Oost, director of the Camera Japan Festival (October 1-5 in
Rotterdam, 10-12 in Amsterdam), and Japan
Times film critic Mark Schilling.
antonym/アントニム (noun): word
that means the opposite of another word
People often say that opposites
attract, and this seems to be the case for Sachiko Fukada (Asami Shibuya/twitter),
an office worker who becomes transfixed by a beautiful fellow employee, Aya
Sawai (Yuri Ishizaka), who she
encounters in a staff washroom. The two
women appear to be the complete opposites of one another. Shy Sachiko is plain and unadorned. Even when not wearing her dull office
uniform, she dresses in nondescript clothing.
In contrast, Aya wears a bright red jacket and takes a great deal of
care with her appearance, touching up her make-up in the washroom mirror and
wearing her hair long. She exudes the
kind of haughtiness one associates with the cliquey “cool” girls in high
school.
However, appearance can be deceiving. While Aya may appear confident in herself,
she is actually masking a lot of insecurities.
Her night class writing teacher calls her out on it when he selects her
radio drama “antonym” to be produced for air.
Rather than complimenting her on her writing, he tells her that the
script is terrible and accuses her of seeing the world with blinkers on: “You
think the world is yours, don’t you? You
only think of yourself. No others exist.” He wants to pair her up with a co-writer to
teach her a lesson, but she digs in her heels at the thought of losing complete
control over her work. She lies and says
she has a manga-ka friend who can
help her, and her teacher calls her bluff, insisting she bring this friend to
their next chat.
Desperate to have her radio drama
produced, Aya decides to use her new acquaitance, Sachiko, to deceive her writing teacher. She asks Sachiko to pretend to be her manga-ka friend, thinking that she can
manipulate the situation, but Sachiko is not as meek and simple as she outwardly
seems. The conflicting options and behaviour of the two
women concerning the script and their relationship to one another triggers the façades
they both hide behind to crumble, revealing that they may have more in common
than they realize.
First time feature filmmaker Natsuka
Kusano, has constructed a carefully considered narrative that puts a magnifying
glass on relationships between women. Although the film is set in Osaka, thanks
to a grant by the Cineastes Osaka Project
CO2 (see: OAFF2014),
it really could be set in any urban environment. The film captures the loneliness of modern
life against the cold lights of the city.
Most poignant is the scene in which Sachiko sits alone in the coin
laundry staring at the washing machine as it cleans the shirt lent to her by
Aya. It’s a cool reminder that many of
us spend more time conversing with machines than we do with other human
beings.
The climax of the film is very
unusual in its stillness. We witness Aya
and Sachiko performing the radio drama in the studio. In this minimalist environment we are obliged
to concentrate on the words the women are saying and the feeling they instil in
their words: “I want to be the same like you.
Even the faults, scars, pains, madness.
If there is a big hole on your body, I want to make the same [-sized]
hole on the same place [on] my body.” It
is an inward looking film that delves deep into the conflicting emotions of
envy, love, desire, ambition, and self-loathing that many people are confronted
with daily.
Natsuka Kusano (草野なつか, b. 1985) is from Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture. During her Creative Writing studies at Tokai University, Kusano took a class by film critic Sadao Yamane which kindled her interest in film. Upon graduation, she studied filmmaking at the Film School of Tokyo, and participated in some independent films as production manager and other positions. Antonym is her first feature film and was made possible by a grant by the Cineastes Osaka Project CO2 (see: OAFF2014). Kusano is currently based in Tokyo.
CAST
Yuri Ishizaka
Asami Shibuya
Tetsu Onji
Seitaro Ishibashi
Kuniaki Nakamura
CREW
Director: Natsuka Kusano
Screenplay: Tomoyuki Takahashi,
Natsuka Kusano
Cinematographer: Yoshihiro Okayama
Sound: Mikisuke Shimadzu
Music: Hiroshi Ueno
2014 Catherine Munroe Hotes
