Worlds Away
the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Japan’s ‘CODA’ isn’t going to hell, but its intentions are lost at its entry point.
LIving in two Worlds
Director: Mipo O • Writer: Takehiko Minato, based on the essay by Dai Igarashi
Starring: Ryo Yoshizawa, Akiko Oshidari, Akito Imai, Yusuke Santamaria
Japan • 1hr 45mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 13 • IIA
Grade: C+
Serious question: Are we supposed to like Dai Igarashi (Tokyo Revengers’ Ryo Yoshizawa), the “relatable” CODA at the centre of Mipo O’s Living in Two Worlds | ぼくが生きてる、ふたつの世界? Are we supposed to empathise with him, or understand him? Because if we’re not, and if the point was to make us actively dislike him and view him as a perpetually childish loser with no drive and no personality who we want to punch in the face then mission accomplished. Somehow, and go with me on this, I don’t think that’s what O had in mind with what is essentially CODA for Japan, and a hard-of-hearing companion piece to Junpei Matsumoto’s mawkish A Mother’s Touch.
Based on the real Igarashi’s garishly titled essay (“30 Things I Thought About After Coming and Going from Deaf Parents to Hearing and Not-Hearing Worlds” if you must know), Two Worlds chronicles Dai’s life growing up in a provincial Japanese town as a child of deaf adults – a CODA – from his elementary school embarrassment phase, to surly and resentful teenaged years, to dismissive young adult trying to make a go of it as a writer in Tokyo. Now, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story from the POV of a little shit like Dai; I get it. He grows out of asshole. But O and writer Takehiko Minato’s story construction is overloaded with teachable moments rather than character moments, and it’s peppered with clumsy bits that never go anywhere or pay off, and ultimately hurt (movie) Dai. They both did much more elegant work in The Light Shines Only There and (Ab)normal Desire respectively, which makes Two Worlds even more baffling. Who is this for? What are we supposed to learn? When can I punch Dai?
How do you sign “Grow up”?
Living in Two Worlds opens with a graceful, silent moment, with deaf shipyard worker Yosuke Igarashi (Akito Imai) on a boat in tiny Kitashiobara, in Fukushima (no 3/11 references here), not a sound to be heard of the ruckus that’s likely surrounding him. It’s a couple of bold minutes that suggest O is going to get creative with how she illustrates the way Yosuke and his wife Akiko (Akiko Oshidari) navigate the world. The sound comes back at home, where the happy couple is celebrating the birth of their son Dai along with her parents, Hiroko and her retired Yakuza husband Yasuo (Setsuko Karasuma and Denden). What follows is, first, a montage of how close to disaster Akiko comes in her child-rearing on any given day, made no easier by her drunken dickbag of a father. Then comes a series of scenes after Dai starts school, and comes to understand his parents aren’t “normal”, and that the neighbours are quick to judge the family, or take advantage of them. He morphs into a bitter teenager whose life sucks because of his mother’s deafness (it’s always mom), blaming her for never “being there” to help him with school – though we never see him ask. He hides parent-teacher days from her. He flakes out at a talent agency interview because he can’t articulate why he wants to be an actor, communication being the basis of the profession. That’s her fault too. He has no clue how his parents met until into his 20s; he never wondered. On and on it goes, until Dai heads to Tokyo and lands a job with tabloid editor Kawai (Yusuke Santamaria), who puts him on the path to writing. This, of course, after an earlier, catastrophic interview at a library.
Now, I get it. I do. The point of Living in Two Worlds, aside from demonstrating how to respect the autonomy of the hard-of-hearing and highlight the micro-aggressions they deal with on the regular, is to acknowledge Dai’s growth as a CODA, and understand it’s a process, and that frustration, guilt and shame may be part of that. The problem isn’t that Dai is a little bitch; it’s that he stays that way for so long we lose patience. Worse, Minato never connects the dots between his epiphanies and drops threads all over the damn place. Dai’s first dead-end job is at a pachinko parlour, where he meets a deaf woman who teaches sign language. O and Minato set her up to be a key player in his life but... not so much. A woman in the class is positioned as a potential love interest who would likely school Dai on life as a deaf person but... not so much. The fact that Oshidari manages to do so much with so little is a wonder, and it’s dispiriting she only has a handful of acting credits to her name. CODA worked because the deaf adults had lives and personalities, and the child was empathetic in her suckier moments. Oshidari, Imai (a phantom) and Yoshizawa could easily have done the same. Instead we watch Dai wallow in self-pity and be straight-up cruel. In the closing frames Dai recalls a trip to the city with Akiko years before and O cuts the sound again, creating graceful, complementary bookends, but then she adds a scene ripped from an afterschool special that saps every bit of impact from them. Living in Two Worlds isn’t worthless, and it does give us deaf characters (the supporting cast is mostly deaf actors) that are as boring, smart, dumb, kooky or otherwise human as any others. Unfortunately commendable filmmaking doesn’t equate with engaging filmmaking.