Koji Fukuda’s quiet, queer ‘Nagi Notes’ is Cannes’s underrated gem

The film is in no hurry to mete out the specifics of its many relationships. Several introductions and meet-and-greets later, Yuri, Keita, Haruki, and Yuri’s sculptor ex-sister-in-law Yoriko (Takako Matsu)—her ex-husband’s sister—become the center of gentle tête-à-têtes, in which the crisscrossing details of each characters’ lives gently come to light. Yuri, who’s still maintained contact with Yoriko (despite social norms suggesting otherwise), has traveled to Nagi to be her model and muse, a process scored by frequent local radio announcements about nothing in particular. For Yuri, who hails from Tokyo, it’s a refreshing change of pace.

In Yoriko’s workshop, sculptures of people from both women’s past allow them to broach thoughtful, casual conversations about where their lives and romances have taken them—and, in Yoriko’s case, where her distant yearning, as a queer woman who once pined for a straight best friend, has subsequently left her. Meanwhile, the two boys, Keita and Haruki, grow inquisitive about the women’s dynamic, albeit for surprisingly genial reasons. As the women look back on several decades of life having played out unexpectedly, the boys have their own lives ahead of them, an at-times exciting and unpredictable prospect that forces Yuri and Yoriko to take stock of what the world still has to offer.

Fukuda’s film is very much one of process, and of laboring as lovingly over creation as one might over other people. Various tactile artforms take center stage. The slow sculpting of clay helps draw out conversations. The diligent chipping of wood scores reminiscence with percussive rhythms. Even the aforementioned sketch drawing becomes the uncanny center of yearning for a tertiary character (one with surprising connections to practically everyone involved), while a heart pounding admission of feelings unfolds as two future lovers hunch over to look at the world through a rudimentary camera obscura—an early film camera—whose image of the surrounding greenery is inverted warped in magnificent ways. Even the most familiar setting still has something to offer.

Shizuka Ishibashi in 'Nagi Notes'

Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

Through refractions, representations, and simulacrums of people, Nagi Notes lenses its characters through social prisms, urging them to reflect on the passage of time, both as something long past and something that may still occur in the future. However, just as vital as what’s onscreen is what remains just outside the frame, and what goes unsaid. Several remarks are made about shapes in the mountainside forests in the distance, which are never captured on screen, but which are implicitly the result of forest clearings for military training in the area, thus establishing a secondary undercurrent—one less pleasant than the characters’ latent desires—which speaks to the masculine, militaristic expectations constraining Keita and Haruki.

Fukuda’s aesthetic approach, although classical and conservative in its rigid conception of scenes, draws alternatingly from the works of directing legend Yasujirō Ozu and from the filmmaker’s own time spent working in Nagi over eight long years. These detailed influences from the region seep into the movie’s unspoken boundaries and hurdles. However, the traditional form its staging takes—a familiar centeredness, practically constraining the characters—is also gradually pierced, the longer Nagi Notes goes on. It’s never entirely broken, since Fukuda’s film isn’t one of shattering or subverting the familiar. But the glimpses he offers, of life beyond traditional expectations—suggestions that take the form of subdued excitement, embodied by the camera’s subtle gestures and movements—hint towards the idea that happiness, or even contentment, might still be possible in the modern world. Sometimes, that knowledge is enough to keep you going.