The
Whispering Star (Hiso Hiso Boshi): Written and directed by
Sion Sono. Starring: Megumi Kagurazaka, Kenji Endo, Yuto Ikeda, Koko
Mori. Running Time: 101 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
The Whispering Star bears some
remarkable resemblances to the arthouse hit Under the Skin from a few years back.
It’s a sparse, slowly paced, terse, and gorgeously shot observation of
humanity from the outside. The eyes
through which we see ourselves anew belong to a character clearly not human,
yet required in some unclear capacity to interact with them, and over the
course of the film this figure’s experiences with humanity blurs both her
perception (if indeed it is a her) and our own of where the line between being
human and being something else can be drawn.
“Her”
name is Yoko, an AI living in a time when both robots and humans have spread
throughout the cosmos. For reasons
unexplained, AI’s have long started to greatly outnumber humans, and the
remainder live in tiny groups on a handful of planets in the galaxy, with only
one left inhabited solely by humans. Yoko
flies a rented space shuttle, amusingly designed like an old-style Japanese
house (occasional shots of it puttering through the stars got quite a few
laughs at my screening), which she uses to deliver packages to various
customers on different planets. She
explains to us eventually that this is something unique to humans- the AIs neither
send nor receive mail- but the purpose and meaning behind such activities
remain a mystery to her, although she has her guesses.
We
do nothing more or less than follow Yoko on her deliveries, meeting a handful
of strange people all living in ruins- buildings, streets, houses, and
factories literally lying in pieces and left to rot. It must be mentioned here that the filming
was done in areas within the still-empty evacuation zone around the Fukushima
nuclear plant, so the inside of the space ship is the only artificial set on
screen- every other locale is a real place of unrepaired devastation from the
tragic events of March 2011. What this
simple fact adds to the film’s central themes of destruction, devastation,
loneliness, and of the tenuous resilience of hope even amidst such horror is difficult
to overstate. As the film’s opening
reminds us, “human life is just a flicker of a candle flame,” and every glimpse
we get of the destruction only reminds us of the fact.
When
not experiencing Yoko’s strange encounters with people, we observe, in minute
detail, the unending routines and monotonies of her life inside her tiny,
one-room ship. Few films have so
powerfully conveyed to me a sense of the emptiness and vastness and loneliness
of space. With literally nothing outside,
we become very familiar with the interior of Yoko’s ship, with its contours and
spaces. Music is extremely sparse, and other
than a single, breathtaking instance, the entire film is shot in crisp
black-and-white, which only seems to accentuate every on-screen detail, The
utter lack of color enhances the abject emptiness of much of what we see, quietly
adding to the dreary blandness of everyday life. Apparently Yoko kept an audio journal for
some time after she started traveling, but abandoned it at one point, and a
scene of rediscovery of the old tapes is the first suggestion that something
within her might be changing since she started having more and more contact
with people.
This
is one of those films that most would likely not enjoy, or even be able to sit
through. The stunning imagery aside,
there is a very large amount of time that consists of nothing happening, the
sort of thing that many casual viewers assume is the entirety of the “arthouse”
and “indie” film scenes- all pretty technical show, with no depth to it and
nothing of use to anyone to say. And The Whispering Star is certainly not an
easy viewing experience, and it doesn’t beg to be liked, or even
understood.
And
yet, it has stuck with me in a way I can’t quite describe. The ending still haunts me. If there had been nothing different to the
last portion of the film, I would likely have rejected the whole as, indeed,
being all arthouse and no show. But the
long hours spent in the empty void of space and amidst the destruction of
Mother Nature is building up to Something.
What that Something was for me might not be what the Something is for
you, but it’s a journey worth taking, just to find out what it is.
-Noah Franc
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