‘Moon’ Shot
Yuya Ishii returns to broken loners and disaffected youth in ‘The Moon’ and takes on a little more than he can handle.
the Moon
Director: Yuya Ishii • Writer: Yuya Ishii, based on the novel by Yo Hemmi
Starring: Rie Miyazawa, Joe Odagiri, Fumi Nikaido, Hayato Isomura
Japan • 2hrs 24mins
Opens Hong Kong February 29 • IIB
Grade: B-
To look at the trailer, and indeed the press in Japan, The Moon | 月 positioned itself as some sort of bombshell social drama about the abuse of special needs people in shady institutions. Something akin to In Broad Daylight, that shines a light on how society’s most vulnerable are systemically neglected and/or taken advantage of – with an intimate B plot for viewers to connect with. It is not quite that.
Yuya Ishii’s rambling, melancholy drama is predominantly the intimate B plot, about a blocked writer, Yoko Dojima (Rie Miyazawa), riding the coattails of her single success and dealing with the trauma of losing her infant son to a long illness. As a way to reconnect with both the outside world and her equally grief-stricken husband Shohei (Joe Odagiri), a stop motion animator still looking for a break, she takes a caretaker job at a facility for the severely disabled, tucked deep in a forest. He’s mostly unemployed, and the money from Yoko’s first bestseller is drying up, so she kind of has to.
Like Daylight, The Moon is based on true events, chronicled in Yo Hemmi’s book, and dovetails nicely with Ishii’s penchant for exploring disconnection and disaffection in modern Japan, as he did in The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue. But he also has a taste for meandering, as in The Great Passage, about compiling a dictionary. Needless to say there’s a lot going on in The Moon, which asks questions about confronting reality and living in the moment, exploiting other people’s trauma and imposter syndrome. Those, and disaffection. It doesn’t always work.
When we meet Yoko and Shohei it’s obvious he’s making an effort to pull her out of her self-imposed emotional exile. Always “on”, Shohei has just picked up a caretaker gig of his own – at an apartment tower. But the death of their son hangs between them. At her new hospital job, Yoko meets another Yoko (Fumi Nikaido, Threads: Our Tapestry of Love), a young woman who it turns out is a fan. She praises the novel about 3/11 that brought Dojima fame, but later questions her decision to sanitise the event, and even the ethics of profiting off other people’s pain. Her other co-worker Sato (Hayato Isomura, Tokyo Revengers) is a fatalist who wonders why they do what they do for the lost causes checked into the facility. His frustration turns to resignation and then to fury. He’s a ticking time bomb.
Yoko initially thinks she’s found inspiration to write again from her unmoving, bedridden patient Ki-chan, who’s exactly the same age as her, but quickly pivots to doing something about the mistreatment she witnesses firsthand. There’s a pair of abusive night staff (Hirota Otsuka and Hideyuki Kasahara) to worry about, and of course Sato, who we see is on track for a bloodbath.
Ishii and The Moon have plenty on their minds, sometime too much, and creating a film about Very Serious Subjects that flirts dangerously with being a thriller isn’t really a problem; legal thrillers, medical thrillers, journalism thrillers all do it. The Moon’s problem is that its ambition is beyond its reach. The cast is strong: Nikaido’s ability to turn her mood on a dime keeps Yoko on her toes and forces her to look inwards at her own actions and how they impact others. Which include Shohei, who she quite selfishly doesn’t allow to grieve, and who she lambastes for making an effort to help her heal. Odagiri has long been a master of the put-upon hangdog everyman, and watching him get browbeaten by Yoko is heartbreaking. The catch is Miyazawa, whose frequent catching of the breath is meant to signal emotional turmoil in lieu of a fully rounded performance. She’s not awful, in fact there are many stretches where her blank stare and sad-eyes-when-she-sees-babies works. There’s just not enough of them. Sato’s utterly disturbing turn in the last act is truly chilling, and feels almost out of place in The Moon. Like Ishii could have made it a standalone film (with considerably more depth to Sato) that was an even better fit with his oeuvre. Then again, maybe the point was just that, to throw a whole bunch at the screen, see what sticks and get us all talking. — DEK