Ainsi Va La Vie (2019)
A portrait of three women striving to forge their own rosy paths.

The film was produced in 2019 by Nobuhiro Suwa as an commercial for a cosmetics brand called ALBION. It was once on YouTube, but now the link is down

172MB | 17m 00s | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6220CADA14E048F/AINSI_VA_LA_VIE_(Nobuhiro_Suwa,_2019).mkv

Language(s):French, English, Japanese
Subtitles:Japanese hardsubs for French, English Parts

The post Nobuhiro Suwa – Ainsi Va La Vie (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The romantic pretensions of Hollywood to the contrary, love is a very messy business. After all, the other person is a completely separate being, whose independent thoughts, feelings, and experiences cannot be accessed immediately through ESP, whose very actions must always be interpreted through the unreliable filter of subjective impressions. One wonders if we ever really do get to know our lovers.

This becomes an even more pressing issue in contemporary Japan. With a spate of recent crimes prompting some to question whether young Japanese can truly recognize the humanity – the existence even – of other people, a number of recent films, from Aoyama Shinji’s Shady Grove to Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s upcoming Barren Illusion, have taken the romantic couple as the testing ground for exploring human relationships in an age of social crisis.

Suwa Nobuhiro, as the title of his new film, M/Other, indicates, has made relationships with an Other – the contradictory interplay between intimacy and Otherness – a focal point for his filmmaking. While Aoyama and Kurosawa have addressed the issue with films tending towards allegory, Suwa has resolutely maintained a documentary stance.

His debut film, 2/Duo, in fact, traced the rocky relationship between a young man and woman without using a script: Suwa just explained the story outline and let the actors come up with the lines on their own, speaking from their own real feelings. As if to investigate what they were doing, he even “interviewed” their characters on screen.

M/Other, which won the FIPRESCI critics prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, continues this experiment, but in a more powerful and accomplished form.

For a two-and-a-half-hour film, the story is deceptively simple: Tetsuro (Miura Tomokazu), a divorced restauranteur who is living with a designer named Aki (Watanabe Makiko), one day suddenly brings home his son Shunsuke (Takahashi Ryudai). His ex-wife, it turns out, has had a traffic accident and asked him to take care of the boy until she leaves the hospital. But Tetsuro not only failed to consult with Aki beforehand, but afterwards assumed she will take charge of Shunsuke, in spite of her busy work schedule. This creates a rift between the two that eventually prompts Aki to leave.

This is the basic framework of the story, but how it got this way and where it proceeds from there was largely left up to the actors. Suwa’s original plot idea (according to the press materials) was quite different – it focused on the three-way relationship between the man, the woman, and the ex-wife. Thus it was the discussions between the director and the performers, and their improvisations, that produced the story we see. There is no script credit here: all that is given at the end is “Story: Suwa Nobuhiro, Miura Tomokazu, Watanabe Makiko.”

Miura and Watanabe thus have much more of an investment in this film than your average actor, and this is evident on screen. Like the performers in 2/Duo, they don’t necessarily produce the most impressive dialogue, but their sometimes faltering, ineloquent words well-up from inside in a way impossible in a scripted film. What they do is not predetermined: in fact, the ambiguous ending invites the audience to give our input in how things turn out.

To maintain the realistic tone, the camera, manned by Inomoto Masami, a veteran of documentary productions, maintains a distance, shooting the actors in long takes and often in long shots. It is not as emotionally involved as Tamura Masaki’s camera in 2/Duo, but Inomoto’s more polished reticence effectively melds with one of the film’s major concerns: the problem of trying to get to know another person.

Whereas 2/Duo relied on interviews to probe feelings the characters were unwilling to tell to others, M/Other reminds us there are no such easy avenues in real life. The film thus operates on the complicated interplay between what is known and what is not known, what is said and what is not said, what is seen and what is not seen.

Much of this brilliantly revolves around the question of space in this very architectural film. In a case of good fortune, M/Other was shot in a real house constructed in the International Style, with windows almost everywhere – even between rooms. While some rooms offer characters the opportunity to hide, others provide no privacy at all, a spatial characteristic that comes to embody the difficulty Aki faces in this relationship. She wants privacy, a space to work and live on her own, but Tetsuro, especially by bringing in Shunsuke, keeps invading every corner of her life.

While most of his contemporaries try to know the Other in order to confirm the social self, Suwa realizes that in relationships we must also give our others the freedom not to be known. We may demand of our lovers an intimacy like that with our mothers, but they are – and must remain – forever Other.

Reviewed by Aaron Gerow

2.46GB | 2h 22mn | 915×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0F4F3368C33A695/Mother.1999.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English,French

The post Nobuhiro Suwa – M/Other (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
When Yuki finds out that her parents are separating and she is moving to Japan with her mother, she and her best friend Nina devise ways to reunite the feuding adults.

1.46GB | 1h 29m | 1013×548 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/BC73F6897A1AD6D/Yuki.&.Nina.PAL.DVD.DD5.1.x264-_gx_.mkv

Language(s):French | Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Hippolyte Girardot & Nobuhiro Suwa – Yuki & Nina (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Yu, an employee at a clothing boutique, lives with Kei, an out-of-work actor who lives off of her. When one day he asks her to get married, the balance of their relationship seems to be irremediably disturbed.

Jonathan Crow wrote:
In preparing for this film, director Nobuhiro Suwa wrote an detailed script and then threw it away at the last moment. Instead, in a manner reminscient of Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes, he worked intensively with the actors to develop their characters and allowed the script to develop from there. Though the film appears to be a standard work of fiction depicting the slow collapse of a relationship between an out-of-work actor (Nishijima Hidetoshi) and his girlfriend (Yu Eri), the dialogue seems fresh and real, filled with sentences that trail off and the Japanese equivalent of “ums” and “ahs.” At one point, the director breaks in and barks questions to the actors off-camera, throwing the film into that fuzzy zone between fiction and documentary. This impression is underscored by the handheld camerawork of Masaki Tamura, the cinematographer for legendary documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa.

2.40GB | 1h 29mn | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2534A800A4CE593/2.Duo.(Nobuhiro.Suwa.1997).WEBRip.576p.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Nobuhiro Suwa – 2/dyuo (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.