Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Takeshi Kushida
Starring: Hideki Nagai, Itsuki Otaki, Toshiaki Inomata, Toki Koinuma
What a time to be a young woman with image issues. A multitude of apps now
allow you to post pictures online and be immediately greeted with praise or
derision, reducing yourself to a form of online livestock to be rated,
"liked" and shared by an anonymous crowd. Of course, the magic of image
editing apps allows you to cheat and manipulate your looks to better fit how
you wish to be viewed. Don't like that liver spot on your cheek? Simply
scrub it away with Photoshop. Wish your cheekbones were higher? Your wish is
but a few mouse clicks away.
In writer/director Takeshi Kushida's feature debut,
Woman of the Photographs, seemingly mute photographer Kai (Hideki Nagai) pays his rent by
manipulating his clients' photos in just such a manner. A lonely female
customer (Toki Koinuma) wishing to snare a husband on a dating site
has him touch up her photo to such a degree that she no longer resembles
herself, but she reasons that if a man will fall for her falsely portrayed
image he'll be too far gone to walk away when he meets her in person. An
elderly divorced businessman (Toshiaki Inomata) requests Kai to take
a childhood photo of the the young daughter he hasn't seen in years and
create an approximation of how she might now look as an adult. It's purely
guesswork on Kai's part, but it pleases the businessman, and as he admits
himself, "A good lie can make people happy."
Are the delusions of the lonely woman and the businessman merely harmless
self-deceptions or something more troubling?
Woman of the Photographs enters darker territory in its
exploration of image-consciousness when Kai encounters an injured young
woman in the woods, Instagram model Kyoko (Itsuki Otaki). Every day
Kyoko takes a meticulously staged picture of herself which she posts online
to the adulation of the unseen horde, and makes a living through sponsorship
from companies that wish to be associated with her beauty. Today her photo
has backfired and she's fallen from a tree, leaving nasty scars on her cheek
and collar bone.
When she learns of Kai's photography and image manipulation skills, Kyoko
befriends the shy shutterbug, even moving into his cramped home. The photos
he takes of Kyoko, sans her scars, don't seem to have the effect with her
fans she was hoping for, and she begins to lose her sponsorship deals. When
Kyoko decides to leave her scars untouched, she suddenly finds a new
audience who applaud her for refusing to present a false image. But Kyoko
takes the wrong lesson from this, and begins to manipulate not her image,
but her body itself, ensuring her scars fester rather than heal.
Imagine a collaboration between David Cronenberg and Hirokazu Koreeda and
you'll have a sense of the curious tone of
Woman of the Photographs. Kushida takes the body-horror and social commentary of the former and
mixes in the observant gentleness of the latter. The result is a movie that
keeps us on our toes throughout, with no idea of where Kushida is taking us.
Initially I feared this new filmmaker might be leading us into the territory
of his shock merchant compatriot Takashi Miike, but he has more on his mind
than grossing us out. Kyoko's harmful treatment of her body isn't meant to
make us wince physically but rather emotionally and intellectually, causing
us to reflect on the lengths many young women will go to in order to find
fleeting online fame. We aren't revulsed by Kyoko's actions, rather we're
sympathetic to her plight, and ultimately, is it any more harmful than some
of the extreme diets models are known to engage in?
Kushida never quite pulls us into the relationship between Kai and Kyoko in
a convincing manner, and it's nowhere near as romantic as he likely intends
it to be. Similarly misjudged is the film's sound design, which elevates
every little detail in the manner of a nature documentarian making an
insect's steps as loud as those of an elephant. It soon becomes gimmicky and
intrusive - we get the point you're making Mr. Kushida, but dial it down a
little. On the whole though, this is an impressive debut that suggests
Kushida may well be the next Japanese auteur of note.
