The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
They call it “tailing without reason,” and it comes to represent the culmination of Tama Shiraishi’s education. A grad student majoring in philosophy, Tama (Mugi Kadowaki) has submitted her proposal for her thesis, revolving around a questionnaire submitted to 100 people. Her Professor (Lily Franky) has a better idea: what if, instead of 1,000 people, you focused on one?
What insight into human nature can be gleaned from the life of one man, chosen at random?
Two hours later, we get the answer we should have known from the start:
Basically none.
First and foremost, A Double Life is a film of empty spaces. It’s a quiet, internal film about all the things we can never truly know about each other. And to that end, it’s an intriguing, if flawed, work.
There is an essential truth about voyeurism that almost always goes unacknowledged, which is that when it comes to revealing truths, it’s an inherently empty pursuit. We can observe the ‘what’, but we can never observe the ‘why’. On a whim, Tama takes as her case study a book editor named Shiro Ishizaka (Hiroki Hasegawa), who just so happens to be her neighbor, and, as she discovers, leads a life that’s wildly unexceptional and yet deeply complicated.
One of the things the film excels at is conveying just how thrilling the initial rush of the follow can be. Her impulsive move to trail a random stranger leaving out of a bookstore captures the heightened intensity, the desperate fumbling with her metro card as she races to catch up with her target before he boards the train indicating just how quickly the random impulse can become all-consuming.
With an increasingly fervent and consistently heedless sense of purpose, Tama follows Shiro around, uncovers his secrets, and eventually comes to learn that there’s a huge difference between watching someone and actually seeing them.
Tama, in her increasingly haphazard investigation, captures the conflict between our two primary impulses as humans in a society: we want to connect… but we also want knowledge of the forbidden. In many ways, intimacy is like a drug; the idea that you’re closer to a person, know more about a person than anyone else on Earth, can be a high unlike any other.
In her observation of Shino, Tama sees sides of him that no one else does, the different faces he wears to the various people in his life. She sees the lies he tells to others and the damage he wreaks on his path. According to Harue (a very funny Setsuko Karasuma), their nosy neighbor, he is the perfect guy with the perfect family.
But it only takes a couple of hours for Tama to see that’s a complete fantasy.
There are only a few moments where Shino is seen from any perspective outside of Tama’s observations, and as any human would, he cuts a complicated figure. Charming and funny at times, he’s kind but also occasionally manipulative. The scene where he compliments a writer on her hard work before cajoling her into getting rid of her favorite piece of writing is an ambiguous moment of either compassion or cruelty… it’s admirable the way the film doesn’t tip its hand one way or another. And his face is a mask when he deals with the women in his life, from his wife Mihoko to his mistress Shinobu… just as an observer, just as in life, it’s impossible to tell how he really feels about them just by looking.
(Emotional transparency is in short supply in the film, as you might imagine…)
Whatever else he does, at the very least his actions give Tama a glimpse into the sheer mundanity of self-destruction.
What’s interesting about all this is that the movie never pushes the suspense of being caught; it’s a foregone conclusion that that will inevitably happen. Instead, where the movie puts its focus is on the psychological impact of observing a life you don’t know if you could ever have. Ultimately, the thesis paper that she throws herself into so recklessly, that upends so many lives, does little to answer whatever questions caused her to pursue it in the first place, because it’s impossible to learn anything about human nature by looking at one person.
To that end, there is a minor subplot about Tama’s professor, who must deal with a dying mother (if you were worried this movie wouldn’t have terminal rectal cancer, worry no more) and how her illness affects his love life. His visits to his sick mother with his girlfriend in tow are studies in the subtleties of human behavior. Even strange quirks like the professor’s habit of taking a picture of his food before he eats it feel less like affectations and more like portraits of the strange things we do when no one is looking.
That the film’s tendency towards highlighting the tiny, human moments in life can therefore result in a scene where a series of photos of prepared dinners prove to be emotionally devastating to the viewer is a testament to the skill with which writer-director Yoshiyuki Kishi manages to weld his heady ideas (which are taken from a novel by Mariko Koike) with actual emotional content, all while making said emotions register internally as opposed to in an showy, external manner.
The willfully opaque nature of the film is best represented by the void at the center of it all. Kadowaki gives a fascinating performance as Tama, who from the first moment seems incomplete and only gains a measure of depth when forced to confront her own lack of self-knowledge.
From the start, there is something fuzzy about the very presence of Tama; she seems a fundamentally incomplete person, and there seems to be no identifiable logic behind her choices. After a certain point, it becomes clear that there’s no real ‘there’ there. There is a disconnection from her life, from her identity. She’s a ghost in her own life. And ironically, it takes decoding the life of another to throw that into tragic relief.
There’s an entire unspoken movie in her scenes with Suzuki (Masaki Suda), the amiable video game designer boyfriend she works two feet away from yet mostly ignores, as Suzuki slowly comes to discover the girl he’s living with is a total stranger. There’s another entire mini-movie to be gleaned from the brief glimpses we get into the inner life of Suzuki, whose running battle with his bosses over his latest project indicate an inner struggle between his art and the requirements of commerce.
I refer to Tama as a “ghost,” but that’s not quite accurate: there’s little indication that she has ever really lived. Tama is fascinating in her internalized emptiness. Even when she breaks down at the end in a confrontation with the understandably furious Shino, he mocks the trite nature of her turmoil; even her damage is second hand.
A Double Life is not a movie to meet you halfway in its storytelling, and as such it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that it fully works as movie: it’s at least a half hour too long for the points it’s trying to make. Some judicious cutting would have made the final beats a little more effective. But it’s also a movie that has grown a great deal in my estimation since I first watched it.
