Start Line

Directed by Imamura Ayako
2016
Seen at the Nippon Connection in Frankfurt, Germany
23-28 May 2017

Review by Roger Macy

Nippon Connection makes date translation easy. 2017 is the 17th edition of this Japanese Film Festival in Frankfurt. It remains a highly accessible venue in Europe to catch up on contemporary Japanese film, including some that you would find hard to track down in Tokyo. All are shown in the original language and nearly all are subtitled in English, with perhaps four of fifty films subtitled in German. It seems never to have been mentioned by the Japan Society in London.

Over the afternoons and evenings of six days, there are two strands of films being shown. In the main hall is mainstream commercial fare. This includes a big dose of films aimed to appeal to teenagers but also more grown-up offerings, such as At the Terrace, reviewed here previously. Another strand, simultaneously across the road, ‘Visions’, shows films that rarely make it out of a single screen in Tokyo. The jury award there went to a formally innovative film, Poolsideman. It asks questions about media-saturation and radicalisation without trying to give a definitive answer. I hope it gets to the U.K. soon, so it can be argued over.

But I was pleased to see that the ‘Visions’ audience award went to quite a different film, Start Line. Imamura Ayako’s film had appealed to me against expectations. I should confess I had approached it with a hard nose and tender ears. Some fifty hours in, listening to Japanese film, the overdose on pulseless tinkly piano gets to me. A morning view in the media room looked good enough for a travel diary from Naha to Cape Sōya on a bicycle. The publicity photo seemed to promise a predictably gambatte story arc. And with the filmmaker declaring herself medically deaf, I could soon put down those clunky headphones, surely.

Bit by bit, I was disabused of my wariness (filmmakers, please note, neither prizewinner employed any tinkly piano). Ayako (we were on given-names terms in this film) started as no cyclist but made a winning opening move. She heads to her local specialist bike shop in Nagoya and recruits a staff-member there, Hotta Tetsu, as her second camera-person and the audible ‘voice’ of the film. The film is threaded with a counterpoint of the audible voice of Tetsu and the ‘voice’ of Ayako though intertitles and subtitled annotations. These, in the version I saw at Frankfurt (I think the only version, so far), were entirely in English. Tetsu’s voice was heard in Japanese but subtitled in English.

Tetsu had the good sense to start with some rules. The intertitle said:

1. He would not help me fix flat tyres.
2. He would only help film.
3. He would not interpret when I met hearing people.
4. He would not help reserve places to stay.
5. He would not help me decide which road to take.

These rules seemed to promise that Ayako would keep her independence and responsibility. But they were also to prove a zero-sum act of empowerment. Consider the fact that Tetsu is always behind and Ayako can’t hear him. There also seem to have been some undisclosed rules: A) No mobile phone or pager inter-communication. B) No GPS or other IT navigation.

The film is decidedly Ayako’s and not Tetsu’s, but Ayako is honest enough in her editing that we soon get to see what Tetsu has landed for himself. As he says, ‘I thought, since you had a driving licence, that you’d have some road sense.’ Tetsu’s camera shows Ayako signalling right and turning left. Nor does she glance behind at all to see if she’s still got her tail. And we see her pressing on beyond her destination without so much as a glance at a map. I wouldn’t have stuck it for the length of Okinawa but Tetsu, in the best tradition of Japanese group self-examination, extracts from Ayako exactly where she’s falling short in her responsibility – time, and time again.

I have to concede that, come the evenings, the tail seems to get empowerment. But Tetsu must know that it’s Ayako’s film. There’s some counting up in the end credits, and Ayako doesn’t seem to think it is only her who is found wanting.

But before we get there, something very interesting develops. The film I saw, voiced in its non-Japanese language, questions the relationship between, on the one hand, being deaf whilst trying to understand things in Japan, and on the other, seeking meaning there whilst not having enough language. Being in Japan and struggling to understand is an experience many of us must, at some point, have shared with many of the audience at Nippon Connection – although most of those at the Festival had the added mix of being German-speakers grasping meaning from an English translation. But for each of us, there is an outer and an inner discouragement to overcome.

Ayako’s intertitles and annotations give voice to her dealing with the discouragements, and it was bizarre how often, when confronted with a non-hearing Japanese person, hearing Japanese people would try and speak in English. But the issue eventually gained clarity in Hokkaido, when Ayako encountered another deaf cyclist, and they link up. Will is Australian and had only a few words of Japanese, but it is he who has the insight why it’s not the same for Ayako – that she has more inner discouragement to overcome when the light is poor and their companions are not turning their lips towards them.

This film will not win prizes for its photography. But it showed that ingenuity could still get life from that perennial poor relation of Japanese independent cinema – the self-made film, or jishu-eiga. It had considerable support to lift it above a self-made film and I suspect the credit for ‘Editorial supervisor, Shinichi Yamada’ is crucial. But there was more here than met the ear to win hearts in Frankfurt.