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I’m embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t until about 30 minutes into Juho Kuosmanen’s film about a Finnish student traveling by train from Moscow to the Arctic Circle—which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2021—that I realized it was set in 1994. I should have been immediately clued in by the total absence of cell phones, but I apparently have an inbred prejudice about Russia that sees it as basically still looking as shabby as it did during the Soviet era, even though it’s been more than thirty years. In that regard, Kuosmanen’s biggest achievement may be the integrity of his production design and how it expresses the hopes and dreams—or lack thereof—of post-Soviet Russians.

The student, Laura (Seidi Haarla), is presented as being somewhat lazy in her academic endeavors. She’s in Moscow to study the language but mostly she stays because of her romantic relationship with Irina (Dinara Drukarova), a relationship that we quickly realize is on the rocks, since Irina hangs with a more intellectual crowd that doesn’t countenance her Finnish girlfriend’s linguistic limitations. Laura and Irina had planned a joint trip to Murmansk to observe the petroglyphs, ancient inscriptions on rocks that line the shore of the Arctic Sea, but at the last minute Irina pulls out without much explanation, obviously hoping that Laura will take the hint. Heartbroken but determined to make the trip anyway, Laura sets off by herself and ends up sharing a train compartment with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a crude example of Soviet manhood cast adrift by the loss of central planning. He’s on his way north to take a seasonal job in construction. Laura is at once put off by Ljoha’s drunkenness and attempts at some kind of rapport—he tries to teach her some dirty Russian words and wonders if she’s a sex worker going to the same place he is—and she bolts the compartment to seek another one. The conductor has no sympathy whatsoever.

So they’re stuck with each other and, as you can probably guess, they do establish a rapport based on their respective insecurities. Laura’s aren’t that difficult to pin down. At every stop she seeks out a pay phone and calls Irina in the hopes that there’s still some spark left. Ljoha’s are more difficult to identify, but they seem inextricably linked to his inability to make a life of meaning in such a chaotic social milieu, but, of course, he can’t quite articulate this feeling. The ice between the two finally cracks when, during an overnight layover, Ljoha invites Laura to an elderly female acquaintance’s house for a meal, and in the interaction between the two Russians (the old woman’s relationship to Ljoha is not clear) she sees his basic humanity. Later, after meeting a fellow Finnish traveler who tags along and then steals Laura’s camera, she recognizes in Ljoha something of her own restlessness and disappointment: “All humans should be killed,” he says, only half-jokingly, when he learns of the theft. Though the two do not develop any kind of romantic feelings, Ljoha shows flashes of jealousy for reasons that aren’t explained, but, in the end, he becomes the trusted road companion she needs, and a much stronger link to the Russia she has yet to understand. 

In Russian and Finnish. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Compartment No. 6 home page in Japanese

photo by Sami Kuokkanen (c) 2021 Aamu Film Company, Achtung Panda!, Amrion Production, CTB Film Production

Serendipity can come in various forms. Daishi Matsunaga’s new movie about a homosexual relationship arrives in theaters a week after Japan’s ruling party embarrassed itself by saying the public (read: the ruling party) isn’t ready for same sex marriage, and then stepped even further backward when it was revealed that an aide to the prime minister admitted to reporters that he couldn’t countenance LGBTQ couples. Some might say that this is the kind of publicity Matsunaga’s movie doesn’t need, while others will counter that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Egoist, of course, isn’t the first Japanese feature film to address the subject, but in many ways it’s the boldest and most self-consciously responsible, which isn’t always a good thing if it draws attention to the fact. Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s 2015 integrated omnibus, Lovers, took a subtler approach to gay love by presenting it in an almost banal fashion, though the overall effect was anything but conventional. Matsunaga gets fairly explicit with the sex because he obviously feels that the viewer needs to understand how these two people connect, and as he explicates the respective living situations of the two principals, Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) and Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), he focuses on those aspects that speak to their marginal status as sexual minorities in a social milieu where they still have to be careful about exposing that aspect of themselves. In most Japanese movies that deal with sexual minorities, this approach can be reductive, but Matsunaga, adapting a semi-autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama, has enough confidence in the story to trust that the audience will take the relationship depicted both seriously and to heart. 

The story is simple yet vivid. Kosuke, whose mother died when he was young, escaped his sheltered life in the suburbs for the big city, where he flourishes as a fashion editor and cultivates friendships in Tokyo’s gay community that have enriched his life without actually filling the emotional hole his mother left. (His father, played by Akira Emoto, is not only oblivious to his son’s sexual proclivities but seems oblivious to anything not within a meter of his nose.) He hooks up with Ryuta, a personal trainer whose material circumstances require him to take side jobs, which include occasional sex work, a detail that eventually gets in the way of the relationship once it becomes more serious. Kosuke offers to support Ryuta because his feelings for him are real, but these feelings become more complicated when he meets Ryuta’s mother (Sawako Agawa), who raised him by herself and is the reason Ryuta needs the extra money. 

So what on first blush feels like a tale about forbidden love turns on the question of how such a relationship is strained by differences in economic capability. Kosuke is self-made and well-off. In that regard, Matsunaga necessarily plays up the stereotype of gay extravagance (that apartment!), but he uses it to interrogate Kosuke’s feelings in such a way that we come to understand what it is he really longs for, and while the answer isn’t surprising, it is surprisingly moving. Being a literalist, I would have appreciated more background on Ryuta and his mother, since their straitened situation sometimes felt like a plot device, but as a protagonist, Kosuke is entirely convincing.

In Japanese. Opens Feb. 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Theatre Shinjuku (03-3352-1846), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Egoist home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Takayama Makoto, Shogakkan/Egoist Seisaku Iinkai

High concept cinema, meaning movies premised on a single, simple, vivid idea, is really all about the setup, since the concept itself isn’t going to work unless the viewer is given some reason to care about it. In Scott Mann’s meditation on the dumber aspects of x-treme sports, the concept is two young women stuck at the top of a defunct 600-meter radio tower in the middle of the desert, which is a pretty weird place to be stuck, so Mann’s biggest challenge is getting the two women up there. 

He does it through emotional manipulation, which is sort of a cheat. At the start of the film, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is almost a year into mourning her boyfriend, who died while the two of them were climbing the sheer rock face of a mountain. Becky’s best friend, Hunter (Virginia Gardner), also a free climber, tries to get Becky out of her funk in a decidedly extreme way, by compelling her to “kick fear in the dick” and scale something a bit more manageable—an abandoned radio tower—the idea being that the exhiliration of accomplishment will make her glad that she’s alive. It will also give them a chance to do something meaningful for her boyfriend, which is to spread his ashes when they get to the top. Becky eventually gives in to this odd idea and the two break into the empty compound where the tower is located and start to climb its ladderlike attachment—without, for some reason, noticing that the whole thing is weathered and rusty. Mann, of course, makes sure the viewer notices by occasionally flashing closeups of bolts coming loose during the ascent. At about the time they reach the top, the whole apparatus crumbles in a shower of metal parts and the two are trapped on a narrow platform where, naturally, the cell phone coverage is zilch. 

The rest of the film shows how the pair struggles to survive without much food or water as they try to figure out a way to contact services on the ground with a fading battery while resisting high winds, vultures, and other affronts to their derring-do. Granted, Mann knows how to induce chills through skin-of-the-teeth acrobatics and shrewd editing—and his talent for narrative misdirection is formidable. I admit I was impressed by how he resolved the whole thing, but not enough to make me believe that anyone with the kind of native skills necessary to rock climb was going to be stupid enough to try this stunt. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Fall home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Fall Movie Productions, Inc.

Having recently lived through a pandemic—though many of us may assume we are still living through one—I found that the details of this Brazilian debut feature, filmed in 2019 before COVID, make it more interesting than it really is: the incipient boredom, the increasingly prickly feelings toward fellow shut-ins, the unhealthy focus on screens and social media. However, that experience also made the premise less credible, because I couldn’t readily suspend disbelief. The Pink Cloud fits rather snugly into the “dystopian future” genre even if it feels contemporary, and I wondered why these people had to live this way. In a nutshell, pink clouds have materialized worldwide, their source completely unknown and their effect deadly—a mere ten seconds of exposure will kill you. So everyone is told to stay indoors with the windows closed until the clouds dissipate, which they never do. That means everyone has to stay put indefinitely in the place where they initially take shelter.

Even without seeing the movie, you can understand the difficulty writer-director Iuli Gerbase has in maintaining this conceit, and at one point he shows his hand by having a young woman, who is hunkering down without any physical companionship, asks desperately to anyone who will listen why the authorities have not come up with some way for people to move around, like, say, with special masks? It’s a good question, but one that Gerbase doesn’t bother answering because his concerns are more dramatic and ruminative. The protagonists are a young couple, Giovana (Renata de Lelis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendoca), who were simply hooking up for a Tinder date when clouds floated into their lives and they are forced to repair to Giovana’s mother’s empty apartment, which, fortunately for them, is spacious and comfortably appointed. At first, the prospect of being stuck together for a while has a certain sexy appeal, but quickly the two have to contend with their basic philosophical differences, which are manifested in the question of whether either wants to have children. This is perhaps the cleverest of Gerbase’s plot gambits, because it immediately clues the viewer in to what sorts of persons these two are in terms of interactive communication. As it stands, Yago has always wanted kids while Giovana has never wanted them, and, of course, eventually she gets pregnant. During the pregnancy and especially the birth (coached remotely by a very patient female obstetrician) the movie makes good on its promise of giving us some idea of how this unlikely situation would play out under the circumstances depicted, but as the movie progresses Gerbase has to come up with ever fresh ideas to keep us interested, and mostly what he provides is variations on a theme of incompatibility and having the principals think of new ways to cope with it.

What kept me intrigued was, of all things, the production design, with its constantly fluctuating pink tint, reminding you that the cloud was ever present outside the large picture windows. If anything, Gerbase knows how to make monotony threatening in a pictorial way without resorting to disconcerting extremes, but in the end he couldn’t satisfactorily answer the movie’s central question: How do boring people get through a crisis like this without killing each other? 

In Portuguese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551). 

The Pink Cloud home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Prana Filmes