Duo
With Yu, Nishijima, and Makiko Watanabe.
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Now that I’ve seen Duo a third time–on video, a far from ideal way to view a film that depends on visual nuance–the importance of Tamura’s personal camera style in this stirring and volatile experiment is fully evident to me. His way of shooting an informal political discussion in Narita: Heta Village sometimes involves panning away from the person speaking–displaying an attentiveness to group interaction that finds responses to talk as important as the talk itself. And the placements and displacements of his camera in Duo are often extraordinary in elucidating the essence of a scene. What initially might seem a perverse choice of camera angle turns out to be a highly original and compelling definition of where documentary and dramatic truth might be found–a definition that resculpts conventional priorities regarding how a particular scene should be read, thereby encouraging us to reconceptualize its meaning.
To the best of my knowledge, the Sunday screening of Duo will be its first and only airing in North America. That’s not surprising given the current state of foreign-film distribution and festival programming–most of it determined by the relative familiarity rather than the freshness and novelty of the works. Actually it’s a miracle that the film has turned up here at all. I suppose one could argue that a single screening in North America of an esoteric Japanese feature can’t possibly amount to much, but I don’t for a second believe this–particularly because a major inspiration for Duo was an esoteric French feature that Suwa somehow managed to see.
In addition, at four intervals over the course of the film, Suwa, offscreen, interviews each of his two main actors in character about her or his feelings and motivations. The main crisis in the relationship between Kei and Yu–which occurs shortly after Kei turns up for a TV acting job where he has a single line of dialogue, only to be told that his line has already been cut from the script–is precipitated when he impulsively proposes marriage to her in a cafe. She responds in a characteristically Japanese manner, by giggling nervously, then asks him, “What’s the next line?”–implying that he’s still rehearsing a part. When he says there isn’t a next line, she leaves the cafe without responding. Suwa interviews Yu immediately after this scene, asking her why she didn’t say anything; she says she doesn’t know, but then suggests that she was thrown by the proposal because she doesn’t think Kei really wants to get married. “Will you ask Kei about it?” Suwa asks her. “Yes, maybe I will,” she says, and in a later scene she does, only to be violently rebuffed.
A genuine sense of existential danger and possibility courses through practically every scene in this film, with casual joking sliding into aggression or an argument quickly dissolving into affection. Tenderness and brutality become not so much two sides of the same coin as two extremes along a spectrum. Yu and Kei clearly love each other and just as clearly can’t bear to be together–a common enough conundrum, but one that’s rarely treated with this kind of passionate complexity and explosive energy. Suwa and Tamura have made it real and vital by fashioning along with the actors a style designed less as discovery than as pursuit–and thanks to their efforts, we become committed pursuers as well.
