Amiko (2022) review [Japan Cuts 2023] (2024)

Introduction

Every year, new talents rise up the challenge to introduce their first feature film to national and international audiences. In 2022, Yusuke Morii, who worked as an assistant-director for Tatsushi Omori, took his chance to adapt Akutagawa Prize winner Natsuko Imamura’s 2010 debut novel Atarashii Musume and bring it to life on the silver screen. Does Morii’s first film prove his talent or does it prove that he should return to being an assistant-director to further hone his skills?

Review

One day, after the school bell rings, Amiko Tanaka (Kanata Osawa) starts searching for Nori-kun (-). Yet, he is nowhere to be seen. She surmises he must be at her mother’s calligraphy class and promptly returns home.

Peering through the crack between the shoji, Amiko sees Nori-kun sitting at the back of the class. Eventually, the sound of her eating corn betrays that she is peeping on the students. When the teacher confronts her, her pregnant mother (Machiko Ono) tells hers that she wants to do calligraphy too. Yet, she is ordered to do her homework first. When she says that she’ll settle for only watching, she forbids her this joy unless she promises to go to school everyday, do her homework, not to scribble or sing in class, not to box, walk barefoot or eat with her hands.

Amiko, despite offering some light-hearted moments, is a touching drama that illustrates how destructive the misunderstanding that marks speech can be and the relational ruin that the inability to narrativize the traumatic unsaid leads to. In other words, Yusuke Morii’s film illustrates the effects of speech that fails to escape the imaginary, the field of predetermined meaning that gives the societal field its equilibirum and consistency.

It is quite clear that the bond between Amiko and her mother is dysfunctional. The first sign that a certain distance marks their relationship is signalled by the way Amiko’s mother addresses her. Instead of addressing her with her first name, she continues to add an honorific to it.

The signifiers she directs to her daughter enables the spectator to unearth the relational signified that seeps out her enunciations. What echoes in the commands, orders, and refusals, is the simple fact that Amiko is not-good-enough; she is, to put it crudely, disqualified from receiving the mother’s love.

Amiko’s position of not being accepted by the mother allows us to read some of her ‘rebellious’ behaviour in a different way. In our view, the fact that her behaviour has an address – i.e. the mother – makes it highly likely that she is acting-out. The fact that she eats corn while peeking, for instance, highlights that she wants to be discovered by her mother. With her playful behaviour, she tries to attain a sign of her mother’s love – see me, love me, but is subjectively washed away by the signifiers that emphasize her insufficiency. Even as the narrative takes it turns, the demand for love never ceases to insist in her enunciations.

The unexpected loss of the unborn child does not merely disrupt the mother’s subjective position, but also crudely creates an opportunity for the mother to reevaluate her bond with her daughter Amiko and change how she has been dealing with her. Maybe, due to this event, Amiko can gain a sign of her mother’s love?

This traumatic event causes a few dynamics that marks the field of speech to stands out more profoundly. First, the spectator gains a sense of the dimension of misunderstanding in speech. Amiko’s brother Kota (Tensei Okumura), for example, mistakenly believes that the grave she prepared for her mother is an attempt to cause her pain. By subjecting her to such signifiers – e.g. itazura, Amiko’s subjective voice is radically silenced by the familial Other.

Another dimension that Amiko touches upon is the dimension of the unsaid. When Amiko introduces her mother to the grave for the baby that died during childbirth, her mother breaks down. The reason why this emotional outburst happens is simple: since her return from the hospital, the existence of the death child has been silenced. It is, in other words, the fact that no place within the familial structure has been made to narrativize this loss, that a physical reminder of it cracks the mother’s frail ego and annihilates the imaginary defences against the not yet worked-through mixture of pain, sadness and guilt.

It is this crude confrontation that, like the way Freud’s concept of nachträglichkeit functions, turns the event of loss during birth into a true trauma for the mother. Yet, rather than leading to an attempt to work-through this trauma, this disruptive event as well as the continued suppression of that what must be narrativized fractures the familial bond and causes each member to drift apart. Kota, for instance, starts smoking, demands money from his mother, and joins a motorcycle gang. Amiko’s mother is present in the societal field as a death body, indirectly visualizing that what she cannot inscribe in her subject. The father (Arata Iura), for his part, lacks any energy to regulate the family’s functioning in a constructive way.

By offering a grave to the familial Other – a very sensible thing to do, Amiko does not merely try to narrativize this loss for herself, but invites her family members to do the same. She is, in fact, seeking signifiers to inscribe this loss into her subjective fabric, but is confronted with an Other that does not want to respond, an Other that cowers and crumbles before the task at hand. While some spectators might argue that Amiko fails to read the familial atmosphere -thoughtlessly spouting painful signifiers around, it is, in our view, the familial Other that remains ignorant to Amiko introducing the way to break free from the effect of the traumatic event – i.e. the way of the signifier, of the narrative (Narra-note 1). One could furthermore argue that her imagination starts running wild precisely because the Other fails to hear her demand.

Amiko embarks on a process to narrativize this familial loss, yet without this Other who flees in blindness and deafness. Of course, without an Other to mediate the process, she quickly runs against the obstacles of her imagination. Can her insistence of this loss force the Other to help her narrativize the traumatic familial event?

Yusuke Morii brings the narrative of Amiko alive with a balanced mix of static and dynamic shots. Yet, ultimately it is not this balance that makes his composition so visually pleasing. While it is not always possible, Morii always tries to elevate his static moments by constructing his frame around elegant visual tensions. The floaty dynamic moments do not only offer a chance of pace to the concatenation of static shots, but help, due to their length, to breathe a certain naturalness into the visual fabric. Morii’s composition, by elegantly interjecting shots that highlight the various sights one can find in rural Japan, allows the spectator to taste sense the atmosphere of a sea-side town in Japan.

What makes this narrative so painful and endearing at the same time is nothing other than Kana Osawa’s performance.The naturalness of her performance does not only make Amiko’s obliviousness stand out and charm the spectator, but allows the acts and signifiers that erase her as subject to hit him/her right into his heart.

Amiko is a fabulous narrative that explores the destructive effects caused by the radical misunderstanding that marks the field of speech and the refusal to speak to one’s child as a subject. What makes Morii’s narrative a must-see is not merely his well-balanced and visually pleasing composition, but Kanna Osawa’s performance, a performance that glues every element of the narrative together and ensures that the thematic exploration of subjective erasure has a deep emotional impact on the spectator.

Notes

Narra-note 1: It is also true that she remains blind to the inner-world of the other and the unintended effect of her signifiers and acts. While this blindness causes many of the interpersonal problems she has, it also allows her to avoid the destructive impact of the Other’s emotions. It allows her, in other words, to keep herself standing within the societal field.

Amiko (2022) review [Japan Cuts 2023] (2024)

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