Asako I & II – first look review

Kyoto, Japan. A girl spots a guy in an art gallery. She is bored by the exhibits on the wall, and so decides to admire this sculpt­ed indie boy by fol­low­ing him out of the build­ing. He doesn’t notice her, but a moment of poet­ic hap­pen­stance caus­es the cou­ple to turn their heads at the same moment. They ten­ta­tive­ly creep towards one anoth­er in a state of pre-roman­tic pos­ses­sion. They tell one anoth­er their names and then, cut­ting to the chase, he snatch­es a kiss. Is it pos­si­ble to fall in love with a per­son you know noth­ing about? Where all you have is the image you’ve hasti­ly pro­ject­ed onto a face and body?

The poten­cy of that split sec­ond impulse is test­ed in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intox­i­cat­ing dra­ma, Asako I & II, which is the director’s fol­low-up to his sprawl­ing, 5 hour mas­ter­piece from 2015, Hap­py Hour. In that film, we saw four women nego­ti­at­ing the emo­tion­al logis­tics of a break-up, where in this new one, it’s all about the rebound, what hap­pens next and the lega­cy left by those who have depart­ed. For Asako (Eri­ka Kara­ta), her love burns bright and fast as nervy, fop­pish beau, Baku (Masahi­ro Higashide), after ten­der assur­ances of their life­long con­nec­tion, decides one day to ran­dom­ly up sticks and disappear.

Two-and-a-bit years lat­er, and still scarred by the fact that her life could be demol­ished so sud­den­ly, she bumps into hap­py-go-lucky saki sales­man Ryohei who is the spit­ting image of Baku, but clear­ly a dif­fer­ent per­son (he’s also played by Masahi­ro Higashide). Ini­tial­ly, she fells as if the uni­verse is mock­ing her, and her resid­ual fond­ness for Baku is rekin­dled. Yet, slow­ly but sure­ly, she man­ages to tran­scend that pri­mal phys­i­cal attrac­tion and a new hap­py cou­ple forged in the cru­cible of time, under­stand­ing and ded­i­ca­tion. Or so it appears.

Yes, the set-up sounds fan­ci­ful in the extreme: peo­ple bump­ing into oth­er peo­ple; dop­pel­gangers crop­ping up; peo­ple able to van­ish from the face of the earth. But Ham­aguchi orches­trates the nar­ra­tive with such a deft and del­i­cate touch, that there’s always a hint of some­thing more mys­te­ri­ous at play. In the pro­logue, dur­ing a short sequence detail­ing Asako and Baku’s courtship, the pair crash their motor­cy­cle, and while lying on the tar­mac, start to gig­gle before div­ing into an embrace.

The film is pep­pered with these tiny, ambigu­ous and sug­ges­tive moments which oper­ate on a the­mat­ic lev­el (stress­ing that a near-death expe­ri­ence has no val­ue when it comes to weak­en­ing this bond) as well as plant­i­ng a seed of doubt that Asako and Beku real­ly did sur­vive the smash-up.

It’s a mov­ing and light­ly philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise on the inter­play between love and mem­o­ry which toys with the idea of ghosts and res­ur­rec­tion with­out ever for­mal­ly fram­ing the nar­ra­tive in those terms. Does Asako essen­tial­ly have to become a new per­son in order to tru­ly allow Ryohei into her heart? Is it enough to realise that def­i­n­i­tions of love are broad, var­ied and some­times even banal? And is it pos­si­ble to ful­ly extin­guish a past obses­sion, to total­ly purge an image from the mind and start anew? Every scene in this movie pos­es a ques­tion or alters a perception.

Hamaguchi’s mas­tery is mak­ing you hang on every moment to see how he under­cuts or devel­ops on his the­sis. It’s thrilling to try and guess where he’ll take the sto­ry next. His young stars serve him per­fect­ly, and if you want­ed any more, there’s an amaz­ing sup­port­ing role from a white cat who mon­i­tors these shenani­gans with sub­lime feline indifference.