‘The Height Of The Coconut Trees’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Du Jie. Japan. 2024. 100mins.

The lives of two younger {couples} look off one another on this flippantly haunted story of suicide, love and loss. Enigmatic and elliptical, The Peak Of The Coconut Bushes manages to discover some resonance on an emotional degree, even when its intentionally unfastened and time-shifting construction makes the story troublesome to observe. 

 Narrative shortcomings

Regardless of its narrative shortcomings, the visuals from Chinese language-born author/director Du Jie – who makes his function directorial debut right here and in addition takes on cinematography, enhancing and manufacturing design duties – are as sleek and creative as you would possibly anticipate from a longtime cinematographer with the likes of Moon Man and The Wasted Occasions on his CV. His love of images additionally explains one of many movie’s main preoccupations: the taking of pictures and philosophical questions associated to it. The cinematography is prone to be the primary promoting level for different festivals after its world premiere in Busan’s New Currents.

On the centre of a lot of the narrative is a younger man (Soichiro Tanaka) who has misplaced his eager photographer girlfriend (Mado Karasumori) to suicide. Episodes involving the pair on vacation are woven by means of the story, which additionally charts what has occurred since her demise. The drama’s different chief focus is the connection between a pet store employee (Minami Ohba) and her fish manufacturing facility employee boyfriend (Seita Shibuya) who, close to the beginning of the movie, plan to wed after he unexpectedly finds a hoop inside a fish he’s gutting. 

This fable-like facet introduces an otherworldly dimension to the movie, as we’ll finally be taught the total life cycle of this ring and meet the ghost of the person who as soon as owned it. Ghosts in Du’s world are employed sparingly for melancholic slightly than horror functions, and have an look as corporeal because the dwelling. 

The filmmaker typically appears extra interested by assembling his existential argument than in connecting the dots between his numerous narrative items. Actually, he celebrates transitions, slightly than locations, with a number of scenes happening on transferring trains – liminal areas that supply the potential of sudden connection which his digicam captures dappled with gentle. Key moments additionally happen the place there’s a transient picture, reminiscent of a mirrored image, overlaying what’s being noticed. One among his characters talks in regards to the traces of souls being captured on movie and there’s a way of Du himself making an attempt this, typically eager to catch the impressionistic suggestion of an emotion slightly than something extra concrete.

Past the look, the sound design from Zhe Li shoulders quite a lot of the temper. There are frequent cases of one of many characters counting again in a whisper for causes which are left unexplained however that recommend the transience of time, and the movie periodically falls fully silent for emotional emphasis.

Grieving for 2 differing types of misplaced love strikes the movie away from the town streets of Tokyo to the forested Shikoku Island, the place the coconut bushes of the title develop, as Du amps up his ruminations on suicide, the motivations behind it and the rights and wrongs of intervention. The ensemble forged provide delicate performances, however the author/director is so involved with exercising his philosophical muscle that the dwelling characters’ hopes and needs are much less fleshed out than they could be. Du proves his skills in all areas and takes on huge themes in inventive style, however maybe a bigger crew of collaborators would have helped him streamline his story right into a extra simply decipherable form.