Moe no Suzaku

Moe no Suzaku is Kawase Naomi's breakthrough work, a lyrical film which made her into a rare company of 15 female filmmakers of the 200 member Director's Guild of Japan.

Moe no Suzaku, is located in Kawase's home town, Nara. Nishiyoshino-mura is a mountain top timber village in Nara, far away from cities. (Her later work Sharasojyu is also located in Nara)

The family of Kozo's live in this village among the timbers. The village suffers from recession and people are leaving the village for work. But family's father Tahara Kozo doesn't want to give up. He comes up with a plan to build a tunnel to improve the accessibility to the village. But the construction is halted half-way through.

Fifteen years after, the building has still not resumed. The nephew Eisuke takes care of the family, while the father spends his time listening to an old record. Eisuke takes the the daughter Michiru to school with his scooter, and his aunt too, and finds a job for his aunt.

But the family is forced to face the reality when father passes away. Together, they watch the film father made of the members of the village.

Eventually, Michiru and aunt Yasuyo decide to leave the village, leaving grandmother Sachiko and Eisuke behind.

Moe no Suzaku shows compassion to it's characters. The plot is a little hard to understand, and the people speak the local dialect that resembles Kansai dialect. There is a lot of nostalgy, 16mm shots, old record playing an old piano theme, which later develops into a soundtrack of the film. Family's voices, insect's sounds of the summer, a daily life.

Kawase never tries to attract the audience, but she rather just depicts the life as it is, whether the audience would love it or not, in a kind of a documentary fashion. This makes her works so genuine and pure. Also plenty of things in Moe no Suzaku are left as a question, and audience must make their own judgements.

Kawase Naomi takes every possible advantage of the amazing aesthetic location, a mountain top village. The mountain scenery seems stretching into nothingness. The summer nature feels so real that you can almost smell it. Every frame feels like a visual masterpiece that has been carefully composed. The yellowish 16mm scenes of the movie feel genuine and are lyrical in their simpleness.

The movie, very much like Kawase's later works, does not rely on dialogue. Most of the rare dialogue is genuine dialect of the Nara mountain village, probably from Nishiyoshino-mura, and it is hard to understand even for Japanese.

Instead, Kawase tells her story visually, by scenes and compositions. Her characters seem unable to express their feelings by words or facial expressions. Instead they just stand there, doing nothing. But they do it extremely well.

This is what makes this movie so special, the genuine feeling and spirit that is there, all the time. The documentary feel of the movie could come from the fact that most of the cast are not professional actors, but natural, real people from the location. Jun Kunimura (Audition, Ichi the Killer, Chi to Hone) acts the father of the family, and is as established and solid figure as in his other movies. The women are less known, but especially Yasuyo who appears in the movie as herself, was very natural in her performance.

The movie peaks up to the 16mm video that looks like a family video, picking up the smells and fragrances of the past summers, while the village was still crowded with people. Moe no Suzaku is a story about change in the family, and passage of time, which every family sometimes experience.

Kawase Naomi said in her interview that after Suzaku, people thought of her as a peaceful person, but that herself, she thinks that Hotaru mirrors her character more realistically, the acute pain of love , and sense of development.

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