The Japanese director Koji Fukada had a bit of a breakout at Cannes a decade ago with “Harmonium,” which won a prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section, but “Nagi Notes” is his first film in competition. It’s also the best of his movies that I’ve seen: a bit schematic, perhaps, but full of subtleties, with a fine appreciation of time and place.
Set over eight consecutive days, the film unfolds in the remote village of Nagi, Japan, where Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect, has traveled to see Yoriko (Takako Matsu), a sculptor for whom she plans to pose. When Yuri arrives, Keita (Kiyora Fujiwara), a teenage boy, recognizes her from a drawing made by his friend Haruki (Waku Kawaguchi), an aspiring artist who has met Yuri previously. Yuri and Yoriko are ex-sisters-in-law: Yuri had been married to Yoriko’s brother, Masato (seen only indirectly, in sculpture form), with whom she lived in Taiwan.
This faintly Rohmer-esque setup, which pivots around these four characters and, to a lesser extent, the boys’ parents, sounds simple, but nearly every scene involves an example of one person misperceiving another’s intentions. Yuri and Yoriko are alternately mistaken for mere friends—as opposed to almost-family—and for a romantic couple. The boys’ kinship also has unforeseen complexities. Haruki is curious about Tokyo, a city he knows little about. He also thinks that his father, Yoshihiro (Ken’ichi Matsuyama), would be a good romantic match for Yoriko, whom he seems not to realize is attracted to women (something Yoriko keeps close to the vest in Nagi). And it’s possible that Yoshihiro is actually in love with Yuri—a crush he developed simply by seeing a picture that Haruki had made of her.
“Nagi Notes” turns these misunderstandings into a kind of running commentary on the subjective nature of art, and the parallels between interpreting art and intuiting people’s emotions. Early in the film, shows Yuri a block of camphorwood that she is planning to sculpt: “This is going to be you, Yuri,” she says—but of course, it’s going to be Yoriko’s version of Yuri. Yoriko likes sculpture because she sees it as a fundamentally public art form: open to all, inviting readings. She contrasts this with buildings like the kind that Yuri designs, which require decisions about who can enter and who cannot. Buildings, she says, embody the ideas of authority and selectivity.
It is clear that Fukada has drawn substantially on the location for inspiration. We learn that the area used to thrive on dairy farming until it had to accept a military base, which changed the local economy. (It also ensured that the village became the site of a contemporary art museum, the setting of one scene.) Another motif—in the press notes, Fukada explains that it came partly from a play called “Tokyo Notes”—is the camera obscura, and in particular the device’s capacity to transform three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional, inverted image. That’s exactly the sort of delicate perspective-shifting that “Nagi Notes” is interested in.
The theme of failing to understand another person’s perspective also figures prominently in “Ashes,” directed by the actor Diego Luna and showing in the festival’s special-screenings section. It’s based on the novel “Ceniza en la Boca” (ash in the mouth) by Brenda Navarro, and while I can’t say whether it’s a faithful adaptation, its expository style might have been better-suited to the page.
The movie begins and ends with departures. As it opens, Isabel (Adriana Paz), a mother, is walking out on her two children in Mexico. The details aren’t made fully clear until much later in the film, but it eventually emerges that Isabel’s destination was Spain, where she hoped to bring her son and daughter legally, to give them a more stable life and perhaps to find fulfillment for herself.
But the bulk of the film—which has a chapter-like structure, with major revelations punctuated by cuts to white—is set years later and focuses on Lucila (Anna Díaz), Isabel’s daughter, and her life after she and her younger brother, Diego (Sergio Bautista), joined Isabel in Spain. Lucila shouldered much of the burden of raising Diego, who is now a teenager and misbehaving at school.
In Madrid and later Barcelona, Lucila takes a series of jobs as a nanny, a food delivery person, and an elder-care aide to make ends meet while partying and chasing guys at night. The children have nostalgia for Mexico; their mother, who, it’s implied, came out in Spain, less so.
All of this information is relayed far more obliquely than is strictly necessary; the script, by Luna, Abia Castillo and Diego Rabasa, treats even basic components of the plot as if they were twists. And while giving viewers the space to get their bearings isn’t necessarily a bad approach, Luna isn’t enough of a visually oriented director to pull it off.
A wildly undermotivated tragic incident triggers a third section back in Mexico, where Lucila gets a sense of the life and the violence that she escaped, and viewers begin to get a sense of just how much the story’s scope has been shortchanged.
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