All Over the Map
Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il tackles the thorny subject of ill-fated romance and pedophilia?
Wandering
Director: Lee Sang-il • Writer: Lee Sang-il, based on the novel by Nagira Yu
Starring: Hirose Suzu, Tori Matsuzaka, Ryusei Yokohama, Mikako Tabe, Tamaki Shiratori, Mio Masuda
Japan • 2hrs 30mins
Opens Hong Kong October 6 • IIB
Grade: B
Wandering | 流浪の月 is one of those films that will be perceived one way by its so-called native audience and quite another by Western viewers. Let’s be clear; that’s neither good nor bad. It just is. Wandering is like comedy. Sometimes it just doesn’t translate when taken out of context. Isao Yukisada’s Narratage is a prime example of this, a film that revolves around the simmering (and dead dull, I might add) love between a student and her teacher, that sparked in high school and rekindled years later when his Mrs Rochester died (seriously, don’t ask). Most of us trip over the teacher-student part. Narratage plays as star-crossed romance. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
In the production notes for his latest, Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il refers to Wandering as something of an against-all-odds romance. A sticky situation that you hope these two protagonists can somehow rise above in order to find a degree of happiness – together. “The relationship is so rich and refreshing, in which I saw a glimpse of an ideal. It cannot be described with an ordinary word like ‘romance.’ It makes us wonder if such a relationship can really exist, and at the same time, it makes us hope that it does exist. I thought I could pursue a certain purity that cannot be crushed by rough waves called society.”
It’s always mom’s fault
It’s here that opinions will diverge. The players in this story are Fumi (a sullen and impassive Tori Matsuzaka, Call Boy), a self-described pedophile in his mid-20s and the 10-year-old who moves in with him after he picks her up one rainy day in a park. Sarasa is miserable at home, for reasons we find out later, and she feels safe and understood by him. She asks to stay. He agrees and appeals to her sense of independence – hey, ice cream for dinner and no one will say no – and finds her use of ketchup sensual. To Lee’s mind this is sweet. To many others, this is grooming. They’re eventually found, he’s arrested for kidnapping and tagged a pedophile.
And this is where Wandering falls down. Somewhere deep down is a confronting drama that draws a line between pedophilia and child molestation, between the psychological state and the crime, that interrogates our collective horror and inability to separate the two (and no, they are not the same thing), as well as the social tendency to ignore what children claim as their experience, a thorny issue to be sure. Lee, whose Scrap Heaven, Villain and Rage are similarly stylish meditations on complex emotions, gets top shelf cinematography help from Hong Kyung-pyo (Burning, Parasite) that visually frames Fumi and Sarasa beautifully, both always just on the periphery of the other’s world. But those visuals don’t clarify what Lee is trying to say.
Flash forward to 15 years after the police located the “missing” child and took her out of his custody. Fumi is living a low-key life running the world’s most boring coffee shop and Sarasa (played as an adult by The Third Murder and Our Little Sister’s Hirose Suzu, who’s been better) is working at a restaurant, ostensibly engaged to an abusive control freak (Ryusei Yokohama). They encounter each other again, and immediately rekindle the, uh, erm, friendship from their youth. All goes well or a while, Sarasa dumps the boyfriend and moves in next door, but then the jilted lover starts a doxxing campaign that outs Fumi and makes the potential couple tabloid fodder. Things come to a head when Sarasa babysits a friend’s 10-year-old (!) and leaves her with Fumi while she goes off to work (!!), letting him take her to his vandalised coffee shop (!!!)l. Girlfriend. Optics.
He’s trying…
She’s trying
WTF? In focusing on the star-crossed romance between Fumi and Sarasa Lee just muddies the waters. If you read Wandering as a film about the line between abnormal sexuality and felony its retrograde perceptions shine through. SPOILER Fumi might be intersex or possess underdeveloped male genitalia, which is why he’s a pedophile? Because intersex equates to pedophile? Hey, why don’t we go totally retro and make him gay? There’s some outdated and dangerous messaging in there that makes the deeper conversation about dealing with life as a pedophile moot, or simply misguided. But as a romance it’s just as weak. The tragedy we’re meant to feel at Fumi and Sarasa’s misfortune is neutered by Sarasa’s consistently poor judgement. She did nothing in 15 years to set the record straight about what happened during her time as a runaway, and it has nothing to do with how difficult it is for women to be heard. Lee never makes it about that, so it renders her complicit in Fumi’s dire circumstances. She leaves a child in the custody of a known pedophile and wonders why everyone freaks out, again an action meant to paint the duo as unfortunate but just makes her look dumb. It’s confusing jumble with no clear message or point of view, and it’s not sophisticated enough to weave the two threads together in a logical or symbolic way.
But that’s also a Western opinion. The novel by Nagira Yu the film was adapted from, Wandering Moon, was a critical and popular hit in Japan so clearly cultural perception is a factor in how much you’ll groove to Wandering’s peculiar sensibilities. — DEK