Radi­ance – first look review

It’s hard to imag­ine there would or could be any­thing more idi­ot­ic in the 2017 Cannes Com­ple­tion than Nao­mi Kawase’s Radi­ance, a painful­ly sap­py roman­tic dra­ma set in the high-stakes world of movie audio descrip­tion. She… has lost her father. He… has lost his eye­sight. Togeth­er… they bond over the nuances of spo­ken word subtitling.

Yes, that’s right kids, this is the pro­fes­sion of over-con­cerned waif Mis­ako (Ayame Mis­a­ki), and we watch as she pens evoca­tive nar­ra­tions for films so they can been enjoyed by blind view­ers. One of them hap­pens to be a can­tan­ker­ous shit who used to take pho­tographs for a liv­ing (Masatoshi Nagase), but has had to ditch his beloved voca­tion due to his con­di­tion. Will she be able to make a con­nec­tion with him pure­ly through the pow­er of words and emotions?

If that set-up sounds like some crazy, sub-Mills & Boon guff, that’s because Radi­ance is exact­ly that, the wolf of trashy, cheap sen­ti­ment dressed up in cof­fee-table art­house sheep’s cloth­ing. On a basic for­mal lev­el, the film is a dis­as­ter, with most shots either inane­ly func­tion­al or inane­ly pret­ty. Between lethar­gic dia­logue scenes Kawase makes sure to give us some vapid, pink-hued land­scape estab­lish­ing shot, or maybe some footage of wind-chimes. And there real­ly is noth­ing else to it than that.

The film fol­lows this odd cou­ple as they simul­ta­ne­ous­ly face up to their per­son­al demons and spec­u­late as to whether they might have a future togeth­er out­side the domain of film audio descrip­tion. As he is tall, dark and mys­te­ri­ous, Mis­ako is clear­ly hot for his form as soon as he starts open­ly ques­tion­ing the com­pe­ten­cy of her audio descrip­tion prowess. And while he styles him­self as a lone, poet war­rior, rebuff­ing advances of assis­tance or help at every turn, there’s no doubt in hell that his black heart will soon melt when he’s been able to spend some pri­vate time get­ting to under the skin of wide-eyed wor­ri­er, Misako.

As there’s lit­tle in the way of plot momen­tum, Kawase has her char­ac­ters blurt out faux-pro­found wis­dom bombs about the mean­ing of life and the beau­ty of the nat­ur­al world. Time-padding sub plots see Mis­ako head home to vis­it her ail­ing and lone­ly moth­er, and in the inter­im she expe­ri­ences an epiphany in a near­by wood­land. Lord knows why this is receiv­ing such a high-pro­file world pre­mière at one of the world’s most impor­tant film festivals.

It’s a hol­low shell of insin­cere emo­tion and thin char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. It’s all set-up and no fol­low through, like­ly to put off a gen­er­a­tion of future film audio describers, as well as any­one who likes movies that have more sub­stance to them than a poor­ly man­u­fac­tured dream catcher.