THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
Once upon a time in the East… It is somewhere between heaven and earth that Evil does not exist, a soaring feature film by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. After Asako I & II (2018), Tales of chance and other fantasies (2021), then, the same year, Drive My Car (2021), Screenplay Prize at Cannes, we wondered what could be more poignant and more inventive than the director, storyteller and stylist of lonely souls, born in 1978.
Hamaguchi succeeds in stunning us by placing music at the center of his new fiction, alongside the brilliant actors – let us point out that the film was born from the sound creation of composer Eiko Ishibashi, who had already signed the soundtrack for Drive My Car. Hamaguchi films a setting of wild nature, two hours from Tokyo, where Ishibashi works, as if to capture the end of an enchantment. The string instruments make us feel it from the first shot, without words or actor, installing their melancholy and repetitive refrain, while the camera, in an intoxicating tracking shot, points towards the treetops for four minutes.
This parade of branches and leaves already makes our heads spin when, suddenly, a little girl appears in the middle of the forest, her eyes hanging in the air allowing us to interpret the introductory shot: Hamaguchi was perhaps filming the gaze of the child staring at the canopy of the trees. This opening, entrusting the music with the task of orchestrating the dramaturgy, is already astonishing.
Fragile paradise
Evil does not exist (Evil Does Not Exist) provides many other wonders throughout its utopian story which embraces the western, as if the Japanese Hamaguchi revisited the founding myths of his country as a distant cousin of the American Kelly Reichardt, in First Cow (2019). Here, there are no cows but targets of hunters, deer, with an enigmatic presence, whose camera never stops looking for traces in the snow.
It is the story of a fragile paradise, which hangs only on a clear and limpid stream of water, crossing a village populated by a few souls. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), round face and mustache, lives there with his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), 8 years old. This descendant of local pioneers lost his wife and divides his time between different outdoor tasks, under his hat which he never takes off: chopping wood, filling cans from the pure spring, with the help of a friend cook, a neo-rural who works in an udon canteen.
You have 57.66% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.