Ryusuke Hamaguchi it is confirmed a poet of normality. After conquering audiences and critics worldwide Drive my cararrives around Venice Film Festival with a new, very small story that delves into reality: Aku wa sonzai shinaireproduced in Italian with Evil doesn’t exist.
And that’s exactly how it seems to be in the village of Mizubiki, a mountain resort near Tokyo, where the rhythms of nature are followed and the most valuable commodity is the water that flows from the mountains to the valley. They live here the silent craftsman Takumi and his daughter Hana, whose life is, so to speak, disrupted by the prospect of setting up a glamping (glamor campsite) near the city. Behind the project are not evil and unscrupulous multinational corporations, but an entertainment agency whose two officials actually try to find meeting places with the locals, freeing themselves from bureaucratic and economic needs and the good-natured disposition not to annoy anyone.
Originally intended as an accompanying film for the composer’s performance of Drive My Car, Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi became so immersed in the project and the material that he reconsidered it and completed the work as a single film. What particularly convinced him was the freedom of this way of making cinema and the idea of having captured it completely the interactions of people in nature.
Evil doesn’t actually exist; it’s a film that runs according to the rhythm of the world it depicts. Little is left out, even less is left out: his cinema thrives on small gestures able to convey, if not emotions, then at least a natural feeling of calm and familiar calm. If in Bastards it is Mads Mikkelsen’s appeal that captivates the viewer, in Hamaguchi it is the simplicity and completeness of his gaze that is irresistible. The director seems to be less interested in the fictional than in immersing himself as much as possible in a context of undeniable everyday reality. Above all, you benefit from it the dialogues, always extremely credible and honest.
Compared to the film that allowed him to bring that home Prix du Scénario at the Cannes Film Festival and that Oscar winner for Best International Film (of four nominations, including the main nomination, the first for a Japanese), Hamaguchi not only lets himself claim his own time in history here, but also lets himself go a more lyrical endingwhich can certainly leave a bad taste in the mouth of some viewers, but also provokes interesting reflections.
In fact, the entire story should be re-read in light of the final minutes, in which the declared non-existent evil still seems to find a way, even in a quiet context like that of Mizubiki village. This does not come in the form of a villain, an obvious villain that one must face and defeat in order to complete the journey of an ideal hero, but in a more subtle way. Evil doesn’t exist, no one acts out of malice, but still Pain and tragedy still find a way to seep in.
An idea that lends itself well to the main intention of Hamaguchi’s film, namely to capture the shared essence between humans and nature in this particular context, far away from the chaos of the city. A nature not wild and inhospitable like that shown in the aforementioned Bastards, but still in danger and in its own dangerous way, capable of dictating times and sometimes even morals. Evil doesn’t exist, so it lends itself to it to an ecological drama readingexpressed so subtly that it is far from any simple rhetoric – too Don’t look upjust to mention a recent title that focused on this topic.
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