Chie Hayakawa’s dystopian drama about a government-sponsored euthanasia programme is affecting, but leaves key questions unexplored.
As ’70s Hollywood sci-fi spectaculars Soylent Green and Logan’s Run suggested, the very idea that a society might deal with its population challenges by eliminating the elderly could only really be dramatically workable in a far-off future dystopia. Meanwhile in the real world, as of 2023, we find the Japanese government publicly admitting it’s facing a looming economic crisis, given the huge percentage of old people living longer and needing care, and the smaller portion of taxpayers picking up the tab for it all.
The Tokyo authorities have just announced a scheme to increase the birth-rate by providing financial inducements for starting a family, but perhaps they could just as easily have opted for Plan 75, the national euthanasia programme laid out in this worryingly convincing drama.
The film’s soothing public information campaign makes it all sound so straightforward and sensible. Removing the existing ban on assisted dying, the authorities can now allow all over-seventy-fives to take the stress and guesswork out of their twilight years by signing up to painlessly end it all in purpose-built facilities. All for free, and with a modest payment provided so you could treat yourself to, say, a deluxe sushi set before you depart. The poster graphics cheerily include a little smile motif, and there’s also the farewell photo, expressed in English – because if you want to sell anything in Japan, an English-language catchphrase is the way to go.
So far, so ookily persuasive, and the first hour of Chie Hayakawa’s film certainly casts a gentle, deliberately-paced spell, as we get to know a gang of old girls with varying attitudes towards the Plan, especially Chieko Basho’s fiercely independent type, who is essentially forced into signing up due to her straitened financial circumstances and lack of family ties.
Which gets us to the movie’s most touching moments, as she strikes up a supportive friendship with the teleworker assigned to keep her on-message, and who tearfully reminds her that she does indeed have the right to opt out at any moment. As the story construction’s ensemble approach broadens out, you get the sense Hayakawa really wanted to make a film about the possible bonds between the generations providing an evident antidote to society’s seeming willingness to throw seniors on the scrapheap.
It’s subtly affecting, as far as it goes, but its sorta sci-fi bliss-out leaves some key questions exasperatingly unexplored. There’s no place here for the stricken and ailing who might find Plan 75 a merciful release, for example, nor indeed does the material ever get to grip with the Japan-specific suffocating groupthink which presents a self-sacrificing injection as a glorious contribution to the nation’s future prosperity.
Quietly determined to stand up for the individual’s right to choose, and to eschew high-concept grandstanding, the film’s thoroughgoing understatement has a lot going for it, but allows credibility to slacken noticeably in the third act, leaving us too rather much room to contemplate its sins of omission.
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Published 11 May 2023
It does sound like it could almost be real, which lends this speculative drama genuine intrigue.
Involving and understated, though it tails off towards the end.
A film of haunting unease, but not perhaps the complete package.
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