Looking over the program for the Tokyo International Film Festival, there were a few titles that I recognized. The idea of catching up with films that had eluded me up to that point was tempting: Mati Diop’s intriguing “Dahomey,” perhaps, or a rendezvous with Almodóvar and “The Room Next Door?” In the end, however, I decided to concentrate on films from Japan, and from Asia more broadly. These were the films I might never get the chance to see again — unless, of course, my coverage helped bring them stateside (always the best possible outcome for a critic).
There was one Japanese film in competition at TIFF that I was really taken with, Tokyo Grand Prix winner “Teki Cometh.” (More on that, and its director Daihachi Yoshida, soon.) But I specifically honed in on the Asian Future and Nippon Cinema Now sections, which both promised to introduce fresh voices to the world. Specifically, the festival is making efforts to welcome female filmmakers: This year’s TIFF included a Women’s Empowerment sidebar and a standing room-only symposium titled “Women Directors Lead the Way.” Both indicate a much-needed change of course in the Japanese film industry, which was rocked by a series of #MeToo allegations in 2022.
Two of my favorite films from Tokyo were from women directors, in fact. “Apollon by Day, Athena by Night” won the Best Film award in the Asian Future section; I was charmed by this debut feature from Turkish director Emine Yildirim, whose bemused attitude towards death and the afterlife reminded me of another of my favorite festival films of recent years, “Chronicles of a Wandering Saint.” As the film opens, Dezne (Ezgi Çelik) is falling asleep on a bus on her way to a picturesque seaside town. Denze checks into a hotel, exhausted; the owner’s husband belittles her, but the older woman doesn’t seem to notice. As we soon learn, that’s because the man is dead.
Dezne can see things other people can’t see. And her ability to talk to ghosts becomes a nuisance in Side, whose ancient ruins are filled with restless spirits trying to communicate with the living. (That’s why Dezne is so tired — the dead never shut up.) Yildirim’s approach to magical realism is warm and affectionate, but “Apollon by Day, Athena by Night” isn’t a puff piece. There’s a lot on its mind, about family — chosen and biological — and loneliness and the choices and consequences of being a woman who forges her own path in the world. It’s a thoughtful and enchanting film, one that made its world premiere in Tokyo and hopefully has a fruitful festival run ahead.
“Underground,” meanwhile, was part of the Nippon Cinema Now section (which also included “Missing Child Videotape,” covered in a previous dispatch). An unclassifiable blend of documentary and experimental fiction, “Underground” is a haunting, magical work of art. Director Oda Kaori — not to be confused with the pop idol of the same name — studied under “slow cinema” figurehead Béla Tarr, who received a lifetime achievement award in Tokyo this year. And her films require a similar kind of patience, with similarly spellbinding rewards.
Kaori has an enduring fascination with worlds below: Her first film explored a Bosnian coal mine, and her second dove into the magical underwater world of Mexican cenotes. “Underground” traverses subterranean Japan, from the concrete tunnels of the Sapporo subway to the natural caves of Okinawa. The latter are where “Underground” takes on a magical resonance, blending impressionistic images of a “Shadow” (Yoshigai Nao) exploring the caves with documentary footage of tour guides describing the history of these sacred spaces.
Many of these “gamas,” as they’re referred to locally, sheltered Okinawans during Allied air raids on the island. Some of them witnessed mass suicides as American forces closed in. Kaori weaves these stories together with the iridescent beauty of the caves themselves, until past and present, life and death, total blackness and blinding light, merge together into a beautiful kaleidoscope. It’s a profoundly spiritual film, once whose quiet reverence reminded me of the stillness of the mossy Shinto shrines that dot the Japanese countryside.
Ironically, the one international film I did seek out was a disappointment. I was a fan of Audrey Diwan’s film “Happening,” and interviewed her about it back in 2022. That project vividly captured the pain and anxiety of illegal abortions, so I was intrigued to read that Diwan’s next film would concentrate on pleasure. Either her intention changed, or pleasure is harder to depict than pain. Because Diwan’s revival of “Emmanuelle” is the coldest and most off-putting erotic film I’ve seen in a while.
Globetrotting libertine Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is bored, which makes her sexual exploits boring. The film indulges in endless circular chatter about sex, set against the backdrop of a Hong Kong luxury hotel whose opulence is, ironically, the most pornographic thing about it. “Emmanuelle’s” blood finally starts pumping in its very last scene — at which point it abruptly stops, suggesting trollish intentions on Diwan’s part. That, or she’s reaching for a vaguely Buddhist point about desire being the root of all suffering. Either way, it’s unconvincing, which means that the audience isn’t experiencing any more pleasure than the characters on screen.
I had a much more fulfilling afternoon listening to people in a movie talk about sexual freedom at a retrospective screening of Kiju Yoshida’s 1969 revolutionary epic “Eros + Massacre” at the National Film Archive of Japan. The print was pleasantly aged, not too faded and just scratchy enough to give it the warm analog quality of a crackling vinyl LP. The seats were mostly filled with retirees, much like the crowd you’d see at any matinee at an arthouse theater in New York. And the day was chilly and rainy — exactly the kind of afternoon you want to spend inside watching a movie.
“Eros + Massacre” begins in Tokyo in the 1910s, where a feminist writer and a famous anarchist debate love and politics while embarking on a messy polyamorous relationship in a period of sweeping social change. It picks up again in the 1960s, where a freewheeling young woman and an angry young man wander the city discussing many of the same issues. The storylines fracture and fold in on themselves, so that the exciting start and tortured end of relationships — and movements — merge into a single explosive emotion. At one point, the timeline collapses completely, allowing Noe Ito (Mariko Okada) — an outspoken feminist who was an editor for the groundbreaking women’s magazine “Bluestockings” —and Eiko (Toshiko Ii) — a casual sex worker who values her freedom above all else — to compare notes across generations.
Afterwards, I took an elevator upstairs to the archive’s deserted gallery, where I wandered the displays of antique cameras and century-old playbills from the earliest days of Japanese cinema. I thought about Yoshida’s film, and how remarkable it was that a movie made more than 50 years ago could still be so radical both in form and in content. Soon I would step back out onto the streets of Tokyo, where the past and the future combine to create an ever-changing present. But in that moment, amid the smell of old paper and the ticking of a distant clock, time stood still.