Third film directed by Élise Girard, “Sidonie au Japon” makes Isabelle Huppert a novelist visited by the spirit of her late husband during a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun. In theaters April 3.
What does it talk about ?
Sidonie goes to Japan for the release of her best-seller. Despite the dedication of her Japanese publisher with whom she discovers the country’s traditions, she gradually loses her bearings… Especially when she comes face to face with her husband, who has been missing for several years!
Isabelle in Japan
The title may bring to mind books such as “Martine on the farm”, or the Emily in Paris series, another story of change of scenery. With fewer clichés regarding the third feature film directed by Elise Girard. Who loves Japan since the first, worn by Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm in 2010, was called Belleville-Tokyo.
Fourteen years later, she leaves France for the Land of the Rising Sun, in the company of a novelist who seems to have lost inspiration and the taste for life. And who will find herself confronting her past in two ways: because she must promote the re-release of her best-seller, and because she encounters the ghost of her late husband.
Art House
“It’s because we’re in Japan. It’s the land of ghosts”, the latter tells her when she gets used to his presence and stops running out of the room in which he appears, lit in such a way that August Diehl, his interpreter, gives the impression of being in a other world. And the viewer understands that this story could not take place anywhere else.
“Your words are like a secret echo to my story” : this line is spoken by Tsuyoshi Ihara, whose character embodies the notion of death to which Japan is linked, since his family was marked by the tragedies of Hiroshima and the Kobe earthquake, which occurred in 1995. Still marked through a mourning that she never really experienced, it is in this country that Sidonie will be able to overcome the death of her husband.
In these places where ghosts are more part of popular culture than in France (“They live all around us”, hears the heroine), and where we hold back our feelings, like the novelist. And that’s why Sidonie in Japan is interesting.
This confrontation between two modes of thought and arts of living which allows her, not to play on the clichés expected in a story of this style, but to ensure that this woman looks her past in the eyes one last time and settles her account with him, and then move forward. And, perhaps, let yourself go to love and create again.
A gentle, slow and cinematic film
With a slow pace, closer to that of Japanese productions, the feature film requires a little patience from the viewer before he can enter the story, not knowing very well at first, what the presence of Antoine’s ghost. But, like Sidonie with the latter, it takes a little time to tame it and let itself be carried away by its slowness and gentleness.
All in a cinematic film, which makes several references to director Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the great masters of Japanese cinema, one of whose characters has the same last name. The director of The Intendant Sansho or The Crucified Lovers is mentioned often enough that it makes you want to look at his work. Just to stay in the atmosphere of this film.