HARMONIUM

深田晃司

Directed by Koji Fukada

Discoveries / Japan / 2016 / Drama, Mystery / 118 mins / Japanese with English subtitles / DCP / West Coast Premiere

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HARMONIUM

UltraStar Mission Valley
Friday, November 4, 2016 5:45 pm

HARMONIUM

UltraStar Mission Valley
Saturday, November 5, 2016 8:55 pm

Description

Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, 2016 Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection, 2016 Toronto International Film Festival

The past is never past in Koji Fukada’s strange and unsettling morality tale about a working class Japanese family whose daily routine is suddenly uprooted when an old acquaintance arrives at their doorstep harboring a dark secret. What at first seems like a warm reunion between childhood friends eventually turns into something far more sinister. Disquieting doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Split into two halves, this quietly furious film explores how memory and guilt can become tangled over time, creating a thicket of pent-up aggression. Pervasive ambiguity wraps around the narrative like a thick fog, obscuring the divide between perception and reality. Mariko Tsutsui’s tortured performance as Akié, a sexually repressed matriarch who seems to accrue guilt by simply taking a breath, perfectly embodies this sense of endless purgatory.

Fukada denies his characters any sense of closure. Instead, he illuminates their prolonged inability to connect with each other, creating an oppressive malaise that seems painted on the walls and ingrained in the floors. There’s no escape, only a dwindling sense of control. The end result is an intoxicating deconstruction of what it means to fail as a family. We watch as the ties that bind rip apart, leaving nothing but frayed loose ends to mull over. –Glenn Heath, Jr.