Love
and Wolbachia: Directed by Sayaka Ono. Running Time: 94 minutes.
Rating:
3/4
This
brave, challenging documentary by Japanese director Sayaka Ono, just the second
feature-length film she’s made, has quite a lot in common with Komunia, another compact, deeply
intimate film whose power comes from how it simply allows us to observe the
existence of its characters.
Initially
supposed to do a short TV doc on this topic, the director found herself
increasingly fascinated by the unique lives led by Japanese people who defy traditional
gender and sexual roles in a country and culture still very rigidly defined by
them. She ended up spending several
years filming various parts of their lives, her biggest focus being, among
others, men who do drag, transwomen struggling with whether or not to fully
transition, and men/women who sit directly on the fence of gender identity and
don’t know where they’ll eventually land, if they ever land at all.
This
is that rare film able to approach gender and the people struggling with it in
a way that does not assume one gender role or the other; each of the people we
meet are fantastically unique in how they identify themselves, and many of them
have been able, often after much pain, to build an existence where they are
freely themselves. For others, it’s still
a challenge; one of the transwomen filmed “dresses up” as a boy for her regular
office job so as not to arouse the suspicion (and possible ire) of her boss and
colleagues. Another transwoman, herself
not interested at all in a full-on physical transition, is dating another
transwoman hell-bent on going all the way, and we see, briefly, how keenly that
strains their relationship.
Throughout
the years of their lives we see, the camera is clear and close to people’s
faces. Many scenes are filled with warm
colors, oranges and reds commonly associated with love, friendship, welcoming
intimacy. I truly felt, from beginning
to end, that I was seeing each of these people in their entirety- complex,
hurting, loving, struggling, living.
This is that rare film that truly deserves to be called kaleidoscopic,
because it manages to encompass so much of the spectrum of human existence and
affirm the worth and dignity of every one of us, without exception or
qualification.
It
is not a film without flaws; there are so many different people shown and so
many names we are given that it gets hard at times to keep track of them all,
or remembering where and how they are connected to each other. Sporadic narration by the director attempts
to correct this, but these moments tend to be rather clunky, breaking the mood
of a scene to state explicitly something that the movie is perfectly able to
convey without words at all. But none of
this, in the end, can detract much from what is a strong, memorable, and
compassionate portrait of love’s power to transcend, to bind us together
despite our flaws and our struggles and make this weird, messy life still
something worth seeing out to the end.
-Noah Franc
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