The 16 years old girl Haru
appears as the loneliest human being in the world, a lost soul. And
at the beginning of the film, she might just feel like that about
herself too.
In the Japanese disaster
year 2011, her brother and her parents were killed by a Tsunami. Now
she lives at her aunt´s place. The first scene takes place in a very
small kitchen. The camera persists in a certain almost static
position. It is morning and like so often in Japanese cinema, the
opening of a film begins with an every day situation. Breakfast is
prepared, Haru has to go to her high school. But from the first
minute on, the film tells as well about the difficulty to find back
one´s way into domestic life in the process of mourning. Suwass
sequences are very long and extreme slow. The action, each movement
is prolongated.The whole film is built with patient and precise
observations.
When the aunt gets very
sick, Haru is literally homeless for a while. As a runaway she makes
a long journey and the film turns into a Road Movie. By hitchhiking,
Haru is beginning a journey away from Hiroshima to Fukushima.
When I saw this long, slow
and incredible sad film from the first row in a film theatre, I
thought how important it is to see such films not only on the big
screen but as well in a public place. As I thought this, the film
becomes even more elegiac. Haru encounters several people who helped
her moving forwards. Except a couple (the woman is high pregnant and
they expect with joy the Newborn), all the other people Haru meets
during her journey have to deal themselves with mourning, losses and
the painful difficulty to find their way back into life: a man whose
sister committed suicide and who lives with his senile mother: a man
who lost his wife and children during a landslide and a Kurdish
refugee family whose father is detained by the immigration office and
probably sent back to his country. Haru learns to share her grief
with others. If it does not ease her pain, it helps her to find the
way back into life.
That is cinema, this big
screen which deals with our fears, losses, mourning and hopes and yes
- this is another hint why Japanese cinema especially in its two
great epoch of the 1930s and 1950s is the most cultivated cinema
culture in this world. So much of these films can tell about life and
the world and at the same time they reflect the mystery of cinema.
Gently and smooth, the
film accompanies Haru on her difficult journey. She is only one time
in really danger when some drunken youngsters try to harass her.
Later she meets a young
boy who tells her about a disconnected phone booth where “people
can talk with their late family members. This phone booth refers to the
literal translation of the film title. Now she goes with the boy who
wants to talk with his father (who died during an accident) to this
phone cell. After the boy it is Haru´s turn. It is a very long
monologue, an imagined talk with her parents and brother. The whole
screen becomes this phone booth during this long and intense
sequence. This phone booth is real and has giving comfort to ten
thousands of people who lost their beloved ones. This phone booth is
both, a real thing on a real place in a datable time integrated in
the film´s fiction – but it is also a metaphor for cinema. And
like so often, a film can be the cinematic pendant to a requiem, the
history of cinema is full of that, if in fictive films, documentaries
or in autobiographic inspired films. That goes from Hiroshi Shimizu,
Yasujiro Ozu to Terrence Malick, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Anjan Dutt, Rithy
Panh, Patricio Guzman to mention just a few.
And it is one of the most
essential elements of cinema where we can understand our personal
grief as an important part of human civilization.
Films like Kaze no
Denwa by Nobuhiro Suwa belong to a film festival because they
remember us that cinema is one of the most important public places
for what we call collective memories or collective consciousness
which helps us to define or re-define our place in the world.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
Sun, 23. Feb, 20.00 Urania
Wed, 26.Feb, 20.00 Cubix 8
Thur, 27.Feb, 16.00 Urania
Sun, 1.March, 20.00 Cubix
8
