Remem­ber­ing Every Night review – cin­e­ma as poetry

Res­o­nant of Japan­ese auteur Yasu­jirô Ozu’s tran­scen­dent film­mak­ing, Yui Kiyohara’s fourth film Remem­ber­ing Every Night is a drift­ing ode to the unsung joys of every­day life. It’s as min­i­mal as a dra­ma can get, soft­en­ing the highs and lows of nar­ra­tive into a med­i­ta­tion on mem­o­ry, pur­pose and recre­ation. Don’t be put off by its ambling form, for its func­tion effec­tive­ly probes polit­i­cal top­ics behind a gauze of cin­e­mat­ic serenity.

The gen­tle dra­ma begins with a mid­dle-aged woman (Kumi Hyôdô) in a job cen­tre. Notic­ing how love­ly a day it is, she choos­es to vis­it her friend instead of wor­ry­ing about her unem­ploy­ment, cross­ing paths with a gas metre tech­ni­cian (Mina­mi Ohba) who holds a bag of man­darins. A few streets over, stu­dent Nat­su (Ai Mika­mi) choos­es to street dance instead of study­ing. Over the course of a day, these three women mean­der through weed-strick­en urban devel­op­ments in pur­suit of bite­size pleasures.

This is cin­e­ma as poet­ry, will­ing to wan­der into dis­em­bod­ied loca­tions host­ing ran­dom char­ac­ters in ser­vice to a con­tem­pla­tive ambiance rather than a strict nar­ra­tive. Bol­stered by charm­ing­ly awk­ward dia­logue, gor­geous com­po­si­tion, and a jing­ly score from band Jon no Son, com­pa­ra­ble to that found in video game ​‘Ani­mal Cross­ing’, Remem­ber­ing Every Night plays out like a walk on a nice day.

The idiom ​“stop and smell the ros­es” is at the heart of this film. It’s a tired phrase, but this film relays it ten­der­ly enough to pol­ish any weath­er­ing. Every chance encounter, from ungrate­ful chil­dren to a con­fused old man, is cher­ished and made delight­ful to watch. View­ing plea­sure isn’t the sole pur­pose of the film how­ev­er, as it pos­es ques­tions about the pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of labour over leisure in indus­tri­ous, con­ser­v­a­tive Japan­ese work culture.

Clear­ly a polit­i­cal func­tion moti­vates the ram­bling form, one which high­lights the cor­ro­sive effects of pro­fes­sion­al anx­i­eties on plea­sure and play. Res­o­nances of Richard Linklater’s anti-aspi­ra­tion ston­er com­e­dy Slack­er and Takeshi Kitano’s yakuza thriller turned beach com­e­dy Sonatine strength­en Remem­ber­ing Every Night’s polit­i­cal inter­ven­tions, turn­ing the women’s per­for­mances of aim­less plea­sure into acts of defiance.

Sig­nif­i­cant too is the spot­light on the women in rela­tion to the lim­i­nal, mid-week city around them. Igno­rant to the shin­ing peaks of sky­scrap­ers, Kiy­ohara stages her women in the sub­urbs, domain of house­wives and most­ly absent of men. Gen­dered labour divi­sions man­i­fest in the film’s geog­ra­phy, enrich­ing the stun­ning visu­als with melan­choly. Yet it is joy that dri­ves the rever­ie, found in pock­ets across the three women’s day and, judg­ing by the film’s gen­tle demeanour, in the fol­low­ing weeks too.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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