Love in Before-Times
Daigo Matsui grows up and fiddles with the relationship drama formula in the COVID romance ‘Just Remembering’.
Just Remembering
Director: Daigo Matsui • Writer: Daigo Matsui
Starring: Sosuke Ikematsu, Sairi Ito, Miwako Ichikawa, Yumi Kawai, Jun Kunimura, Reika Oozeki, Ryo Narita, Masatoshi Nagase, Misuzu Kanno
Japan • 1hr 55mins
Opens Hong Kong June 16 • IIA
Grade: B
Mixing up the structure and pace of a relationship drama is tricky business. We’re trained to expect certain things at certain moments, so when the big blowout happens we saw it coming. When the cheating starts, we saw it coming. When the career gets prioritised, when the physical affection wanes, when the friends and family start asking what’s going on, well, we saw all that coming. So credit to anyone trying to get creative with an ironclad format.
That doesn’t mean it always works. Richard LaGravenese’s film adaptation of the musical The Last Five Years (which I did not see) was insufferable to a degree that obfuscated the relatively clever conceit of telling the story of a romance in two directions (she told it from end to start, he went in standard forward time). Less insufferable and more lumbering was Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him/Her/Them, the life of a relationship from his perspective, then hers, then both together in THREE BLOODY FILMS, spanning FIVE BLOODY HOURS. Did people forget Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon perfected the multiple perspective thing in 88 minutes? Point is, it’s a hard formula to freshen up, though Daigo Matsui comes close in Just Remembering | ちょっと思い出しただけ. He doesn’t add a lot to the conversation, but there’s a delicate pathos at play that works for the featherweight story. And it’s not insufferable.
Those were the days
Loosely inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (which is frequently on TV), Just Remembering begins at the end. Teruo (Sosuke Ikematsu, Hirokazu Koreeda’s After the Storm) wakes up on July 26, his birthday, and goes about his humdrum day: he does a bit of exercise, feeds the cat, pays respects to a local grave, greets the oddly peaceful man (Masatoshi Nagase) waiting for his wife on a park bench, heads to work as a theatre lighting technician. He was a dancer, but a busted knee ended his performing career. Elsewhere in Tokyo cab driver Yo (Sairi Ito) shuttles around her fares, making COVID-distanced chit chat. The next day, Teruo wakes up and starts his routine on … July 26. Rinse and repeat.
Writer-director Daigo Matsui’s formal experiment takes a while to present, so the precious early goings of the film are more confusing than engaging, and a viewer could easily find themselves distracted by the calendar to a degree that crucial details are missed. That said, the construct does present, and once Teruo’s second or third birthday rolls around and the two narratives streams clearly head for an intersection, Just Remembering settles into a low-key, meditative drama whose beginning signals a bittersweet conclusion. We know how this ends (as we do in all relationship dramas) but anticipating the initial spark of romance and excitement and newness – and oblivious to the looming COVID outbreak – with that knowledge really twists the knife.
Matsui is probably best know for his explorations of youth and youth culture, among them Our Huff and Puff Journey, which follows four teen girlfriends on their way to Tokyo for a J-Rock concert, and the quasi-feminist Japanese Girls Never Die, about another group of girlfriends putting random men in their places. Just Remembering is a departure for him. There was a degree of stylised wish fulfilment in his earlier work, where this time he’s grounding the action in a semblance of reality. Even though the backwards direction reveals nuggets that elucidate later actions (as any film does), there’s a blandness to the couple’s connection that resonates, and which is likely more common than most of us want to believe. Teruo and Yo’s “spark” isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s a game-recognise-game attitude, a realisation they share similar expectations from life and so make a solid, logical match. There’s no feverish pulling of clothes here. Just a mutual understanding that ultimately crumbles, and which leads Ikematsu and Ito make appropriately anti-climactic. Drag, dude. — DEK