inochi

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

it's something to be said of the fast-paced-multimedia assault that i am exposed to everyday that it took me some minutes to adjust to the slow pacing of inochi. the last film with similar pacing that i saw was babel; like that film, inochi forced me to sit down and stay with a movie full of long, lingering shots with many quite, dialogue-less stretches.

my visceral, instant gratification-needing self still thinks the movie felt too long (it was a little less than 2 hours, in fact); but the more patient part of me thinks i needed something like that.

inochi was about the last few months of the life of a japanese stage director. it was also about his girlfriend of 10 years who eventually left him for a married man, then left him when she got pregnant. it was stated she had a history of attempting suicide, and she initially was thinking of having the baby aborted.

what was that? these weren't easy characters to deal with. this wasn't an easy movie to deal with. this wasn't a "normal" over-the-top japanese movie with really bad (but absolutely fun to watch) acting.

higashi was diagnosed with cancer that has spread to his liver, lungs, and (eventually) his esophagus. he thought he was ready to die. yu will be having a baby but she didn't know whether she wanted to keep him or not. the child's father being married but childless with his wife, he wanted her to keep the baby but can't help in raising the child. her time at an all-time low, she renewed contact with her ex, higashi.

yu realized higashi was sick and helped him see a doctor. they found out it was cancer, and he had very little time left to live. in the midst of that, yu asked if she could get back with higashi until she gave birth to the baby. higashi agreed. like the most significant decisions we make in our lives, in hindsight, that decision did not make any sense.

and yet it turned out to be near-perfect. in the most quietly moving scenes of the movie, higashi, dying of cancer, was watching the rain turn to snow outside the hospital window when he heard a newborn's cry. it was yu's son that was born. a nurse approached him, and told him both are well and asked him if he wanted to see the baby. the first person the baby was introduced to was neither his mother nor father, it was higashi. he saw himself being reborn. and then he decided he doesn't want to die yet.

the movie could have ended there and the audience would've been happy knowing the cycle of life continues: another life was born while another was dying, but we didn't need to see the dying person die. but that's the conventions of drama, and this was about a real person's life. i wonder if the late director would appreciate the dramatic restraint in his biopic.

the film had plenty of beautifully composed scenes that lovingly linger on the character's faces. one would think seeing too many soap operas would have diminished the impact of close-up, but the movie captured these close-ups as they should have been. they highlighted the character's nuances, letting the audience appreciate the amazingly understated acting.

but the outside the close-ups, the other scenes were no less powerful. a character's posture amidst an otherwise empty hall showed fortitude in a bleak situation. a dying man cradling a little baby seen behind lines where temple-goers pinned their prayers was so movingly intimate, i thought about looking away.

like babel, this was a very visually telling film. there were no deserts here, though, but scenes of familiar domesticity: apartments, hospitals, parks. throughout the movie, yu was a tall figure in long skirts, dark colors, and long flowing hair that highlighted her very handsome face. she was surrounded by people in brightly colored clothing: they were full of life, but she had to struggle with hers. her and higashi were like two shadows moving among humanity.

i went in to the cinema without any idea what the movie was about. so there i was, recovering from my throat illness (with my boyfriend going through a similar illness), watching one of the main characters coughing on screen. i watched it with vanny and her brother; they recently lost their mom to cancer and we were watching a movie about a man who was at his last few months living with it. i guess they liked the film. i did. (i did call dar after the movie, to check how he's doing.)

inochi felt like a made-for-tv movie, but in a way made-for-tv movies fail to capture. it lacked blatant artifice, the acting was very restrained and the story intimately portrayed. it was a moving replaying of the lives of two people who stuck together because they felt they were the closest thing they had to family.