Japanese director Yui Kiyohara is clearly a believer in time, not speed, and situation over story. For nearly two hours, with virtually no plot to speak of, her slow, drifting drama follows three women on a spring day in a suburb near Tokyo. It’s a film of long shots and long silences. The mood is difficult to pin down; challenging arthouse that tiptoes close to quirky. In places it feels almost like CCTV directed by Wes Anderson. How well you get on with it will probably depend on how you feel about watching a woman carefully sorting through a pile of mail for well over a minute. Deeply boring or oddly fascinating?
The setting is Tama New Town, a pleasant 1970s suburb near Tokyo with low-rise blocks of flats and rustling trees. Chizu (Kumi Hyôdô) is in her 40s, recently made redundant from her job at a kimono shop. We watch as she organises her post, visits the job centre and gets lost trying to find the house of an acquaintance who has moved. As dramatic as this gets is an action sequence in which Chizu climbs a tree to rescue a shuttlecock for a couple of kids playing badminton. It does not go well. “Don’t bother,” mutters one boy, and the children wander off, leaving her up the tree.
Chizu’s path crosses with a gas meter-reader in her early 30s (Manami Ohba), who is helping an elderly man with dementia find his way home. The camera also strays after university student Natsu (Ai Mikami), grieving the death of a friend who has died tragically young. As the minutes drift it’s undoubtedly challenging viewing but I felt mostly drawn into the world Kiyohara creates. Though at times, attention lagging, you could benefit from the gently nagging voice of a meditation app with a persistent reminder to gather your wandering thoughts.