This omnibus of shorts, all written and directed by women of different nationalities and centered on the unique problems that women face in the world, is predictably earnest in a kind of European way (the production is mostly Italian), but one stands out for its almost banal simplicity of purpose. Mipo O’s “A Week in My Life” focuses on a Tokyo apartment headed by a single mother (Anne Watanabe) raising two very young children. It shows her routine—getting up at the crack of dawn, fixing breakfast and bentos, getting her older kid off to kindergarten and then biking her younger one to daycare so she can put in an almost full day of work at a prepared food establishment; then returning to pick up her kids, fix them dinner, help them with their homework, and, if she’s lucky (the 15-minute film does, miraculously, encompass a whole week), taking care of her own needs after putting her kids to bed. There’s no mention of a man or extended family; no complaining about her lot in life; not even anything really approaching “drama,” except maybe suspense over whether she’ll get out the door in time.

O’s concise profile tells me more about a woman’s lot in life than the other, more pointed tales. The movie opens boldly with Taraji P Henson’s depiction of a true story about a female inmate (Jennifer Hudson) whose multiple personality disorder makes it difficult for her to secure release. Though the film makes a good case for providing proper mental health care to people in distress—in this case a woman raised in an abusive environment—the presentation is so broad and loud that you can’t see the forest for all the trees erected by Hudson’s hyperbolic performance. Similarly, Catherine Hardwicke’s “Elbows,” in which a physician’s (Marcia Gay Harden) rounds checking in on unhoused people during the COVID pandemic is highjacked by Cara Delevingne as a young woman with severe OCD refusing to remove her many layers of clothes so that the doctor and her assistant can clean her, is intriguing, but the film seems to be more about Delevingne’s acting than anything else. 

Three other works are more conventional—a famous architect (Eva Longoria) inconvenienced when her late sister’s will names her as her niece’s guardian; a veterinarian (Margherita Buy) discerning from a woman’s signals that she is being abused by her husband; a transgender Indian woman going on a highly anticipated date—while the final animated entry is an anodyne, Pixar-inflected, head-scratching allegory. If this were a competition, O’s film would win hands down because it says so much with so little. 

In English, Italian, Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Tell It Like a Woman home page in Japanese