Japon

Reviewed by Minna Alanko

Japón is an interesting example of under represented South American cinema, a welcome change from American films that dominate even the FACT centre. It is a story of a man (Alejandro Ferretis) who leaves behind the busy life of the city and escapes into the Mexican countryside to prepare for the ultimate peace - death. He arrives at a small village in a remote canyon and finds a place to stay with an old widow (Magdalena Flores), who is living apart from the villagers in the house of her late husband.

In the peaceful village the man is surrounded by life, and the slow pace of the story makes every flickering moment meaningful. Images of death reoccur, throbbing and blood-red, but interwoven with life and inseparable from it. The man observes everything with quiet curiosity, meditatively. Emotions replace dialogue. The gliding long-distance shots appreciate the surrounding nature – grand and indifferent to human consciousness, small and quick to vanish like a raindrop or a stone rolling down the cliffs of the canyon. The man’s quest for death is challenged by the very core of existence. Life is flowing through him, and he yields to the basic instincts, his sexuality, his beating heart.The rhetorical decision whether to live or die is pushed aside by the man’s feelings for the widow, whose well-being is threatened more acutely than his own.
The struggle for justice, however, is harder than an inward crisis of the individual. The end is abrupt; death – a fleeting moment. (Mexico 2002)