THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Couldn’t a film set itself the mission of reconciling comedy and elegy, without falling into the compromise of sweet bitterness? In any case, it is at the crossroads of these contrary moods that Elise Girard (Belleville Tokyo2011; Funny birds, 2017), ex-cinephile press officer behind the camera, registered her third feature film, written with Maud Ameline and the late Sophie Fillières, filmmaker and screenwriter who passed away at the age of 58 in July 2023, renowned for her “rooster” humor. the donkey.” We will not be surprised then that this travel story, juggling with tones, seeks its melancholy in the comical forms of shift and displacement.
The title sets the tone with the candor of a childish album: Sidonia in Japan, she is a Westerner on tour in a country she does not know, and in whom the distance from things opens a cottony interior parenthesis. And who better to embody it than a virtuoso of phase shift like Isabelle Huppert, who, projected to the antipodes, continues here an informal series of journeys in Asia after her adventures with the South Korean Hong Sang-soo (In Another Countryin 2012, and A Traveler’s Needin 2024).
Sidonie therefore embarks, hesitantly, on a sixteen-hour flight to Osaka, in order to support the reissue of her first book, a best-selling book. Her editor, Kenzo Mizoguchi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) – no relation to the famous director – waits for her at the airport, then chaperones her in a tour of signings and interviews.
The two immediately form a dysfunctional duo: he, very touchy and reserved, she, a bouncy and uninhibited little French woman. They nevertheless come together on the ground of mourning, each dragging their dead and their sadness in the soul. Moreover, every time Sidonie, going from hotel to hotel ryokan (traditional inn), finds himself in the privacy of a room, clues of a third presence reach him: open window, opened bentos, playing cards strewn on the tatami. And as in Japan it is accepted that spirits surround the living, a ghost (August Diehl) does not take long to appear to him.
Intimate echo chamber
Sidonia in Japan, throughout the sphere of its heroine, approaches the journey in minor mode, in small touches, establishing a sort of color chart of oddities and inconveniences. The complexity of the Japanese code of politeness, to which the foreigner remains impervious, is a source of both comical clashes and bitter hesitations. The sober use of the static shot sets up a small theater of slippage around Sidonie, a foreign body in the Japanese setting. However, it is the experience of solitude that the staging refers to, through the width of the frames, its languid rhythm and its quiet progression.
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