WHAT was a Japanese film doing in Cine Europa? The film Fukushima, mon Amour is really a German drama film set in Tohoku, the northern part of Japan which experienced the 9-magnitude earthquake in 2011. A great part of the dialogue in the film is in Japanese, with a sprinkling of English and German. There is of course the language of images, which makes this quirky, odd story a compelling and, sometimes, heart-tugging film.
The story starts with a young German woman dreaming of herself committing suicide by hanging. It is almost predictive, that scene, but where it will take place, we do not know. That lack of knowledge about the direction of a film that one is tempted to address as predictable is strangely the power of this narrative about two strangers in a strange land.
Marie is part of an organization of clowns with the aim of entertaining the refugees from the great earthquake in that part of Japan. As all the young women and men have already left the place, the evacuation area is populated by mostly old women. These old Japanese women remain polite when the clowns arrive and do their stunts, which are abstracted given that the ideas seem to come from a culture different from the women in the audience.
But the Japanese women persist in listening to the stories, following the instruction. There is nothing to do in the area and anything, anything at all, will entertain them. When Marie introduces hula hoops, the middle-aged women and the old women follow her even as they do not have the skills to do the tricks and the dance.
A grouchy old lady is less polite. She is confrontational with Marie. Together, with Marie not able to see her leave the camp alone, they travel to the zone where human beings are not allowed. A nuclear reactor damaged by the earthquake and the tsunami that ravaged the countryside has brought about radiation in the area. But Satomi, the Japanese lady, is bent on returning to the area for that is where her home is.
Marie helps Satomi rebuild the house. Even in that miserable, dark place, Satomi makes it a point to remind Marie that, as a European woman, she does not have the grace to go through even the daily rituals Japanese women have to go through. But Marie learns.
The plot involving a Japanese and a Westerner, with the latter depicted as clumsy beside the more gracious Japanese, is old. In Fukushima, mon Amour, this unlikely tandem is pushed to its limits by making the Japanese woman a geisha, accomplished in many things the European woman would never even aspire to have.
The isolation of the place, however, awakens a deeper bond between Satomi and Marie. The two are both wounded souls, with Satomi ready to claim the burden of grief and Marie seemingly too irrational to recognize the anguish that pushes her down. The surface strength of Marie brings her closer to what she feels to be the inner control of Satomi. And yet, many things are still to be revealed that will render the two women vulnerable.
Orientalism rears its seductive but facile appearance when Satomi is pictured to be strongly and uniquely the opposite of the European Marie.
Is the German director Doris Dorrie romanticizing once more the Asiatic female?
There is no clear answer to that question. What we do get as the narrative unfolds is a series of original scenes that gradually paint the landscape where two women are struggling with their own demons and battling the angels of beautiful feelings that fly out every now and then. The reality of returning to a home that does not look anymore a home because the neighbors are gone becomes less real as the apparitions of ghosts.
“You attract ghosts because you are unhappy,” Satomi tells Marie. The Japanese woman speaks of ghosts the way Marie speaks of her own sorrows. In return, Marie shares with Satomi her desire to be relieved of the burdens of the past, the sadness of her own existence. And yet, Satomi assures Marie that this is her life and there is no way out of this.
In another retelling, the conversation between the two could have accrued into Zen platitude and Buddhist seminars. But Fukushima, mon Amour has enough shadow to allow the light to filter in easily. It is in the gloom, in the furtive and quiet gestures of a dance, that the two women begin to learn about themselves. Even the act of self-immolation is not granted a shining moment. Marie, in an effort to prevent Satomi from hanging herself, cuts the branch that will make possible any person’s personal death wish. It is an act so practical that we are tempted to call that decision the product of Western/European pragmatism. That action of Marie, however, is full of humor and poignancy.
As Marie, Rosalie Thomass has the height and allure that enable the creation of a comic actor—without the comic relief—who will forever be considered bungling by Satomi. She tries to drink tea in the Japanese way, but the effort is just too much. We are Marie listening to Satomi lecturing on “you and the cup of tea.” We become Marie watching Satomi who watches us make mistakes, all from the Japanese perspective.
As Satomi, Kaori Momoi, the elegant actress who has appeared in films of Kurosawa and Shimamura, is the reason why, with amazement, we accept the words of Satomi. Her Satomi is as bleak and spare as the landscape that should not be allowing humans and homes. It is this Satomi also that allows us to believe in the story of destruction as only that, physical annihilation. The greater loss and ravages are created by people and their loves. Art brings in further complications.
There is the third character that makes the film Fukushima, mon Amour unforgettable: it is the land, the zone full of radiation, the horizon that has the memory of the earthquake and huge waves.
In 1959, Alain Resnais made a film, called Hiroshima Mon Amour. The story uses Hiroshima as a locale, but is not about the atomic bomb and war. It is about two lovers conversing. I am tempted, like a graduate student finishing a small paper, to call Fukushima, mon Amour a homage to that older film. As with the French film, this German film recalls the great earthquake almost like a bad dream and not a cautionary tale about disaster and the tapping of nuclear energies, which remains one of humankind’s follies.
Fukushima, mon Amour was one of the films screened in the recently concluded third edition of Cine Europa in the Ateneo de Naga University. The film has another title: Grüße aus Fukushima or Greetings from Fukushima.