See you in Tokyo, by Japanese director Daigo Matsui, tells a love story in an inverted construction. An original way to scrutinize this elusive feeling that is love. The release date in France, July 26, was not chosen at random.
All’s well that ends badly, and that’s where the film begins. Yet everything had started well, but that, we will only learn at the end. The story begins on July 26. Teruo (Sousuke Ikematsu) is alone to celebrate his birthday. This is the first beat of the film, and chronologically the last. Teruo, lighting designer and former professional dancer and Yo (Sairi Ito)taxi driver, are separated.
Starting from the end, the film unfolds in seven tableaux. We will learn through this story in reverse that Teruo and Yo met six years earlier, on July 26, and that they had a great love. We will find them on this same date seven times. In the meantime there will have been the Covid, moments of euphoria and also melancholy, and a broken foot marking the end of Teruo’s dancing career.
“It’s a miracle to have someone to wait for”
Will they love each other forever, get married, have many children? Rehashed a thousand times, the theme of a romantic encounter is here immediately rid of the tension that usually weighs on the outcome of an idyll. The director frees himself from the chronology to deliver a scenario that begins with the end, then ends up resembling a puzzle to be put together, as if the past and the future were dissolving in the present time.
The film thus explores the key moments, such as the meeting, the declaration, the separation, but also the little things that punctuate the lives of lovers, and that make up this singular alchemy that makes each love story unique. At the head of a theater troupe, Daigo Matsui also evokes in this film the period of Covid, so complicated for live performance and more broadly for the entire population.
The Japanese director explores the complexity, the precious and fragile nature of the feeling of love through a staging that plays with repetitions and contrasts (day/night, interior/exterior, joy/melancholy). A unity of places, with changing decorations, or the focus on a motif (the birthday cake)… All these little details indirectly give us indications on the evolution of the relationship of the two lovers.
The question of the mysteries of love is also explored in the background, with the secondary characters. “It’s a miracle to have someone to wait for” whispers the lonely man sitting on a bench in the park crossed by the two protagonists for all these years, who awaits the return of his missing wife every day.
Made in small strokes, in a very slow rhythm (a bit too slow sometimes) See you in Tokyo is an atmospheric film that raises more questions than it answers, leaving vacant spaces conducive to interpretation and daydreaming. The two actors offer a perfectly synchronized and graceful choreography. Sari Ito, her fairy tale physique, her broken voice, her almost clownish playing, composes an almost Fellinian figure.
Sprinkled with nods to Night of Earth by Jarmusch, this first film by Daigo Matsui to be released in France received the Audience Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2022 “for his delicious exploration of two young adults in Tokyo. Sousuke Ikematsu and Sairi Itô, who interpret them in perfect alchemy, are simply magnificent!”, greeted Isabelle Huppert, its president.
The sheet
Gender : Romance, Drama
Director: Daigo Matsui
Actors: Sousuke Ikematsu, Sairi Itoh, Ryo Narita
Country : Japan
Duration : 1h 55min
Exit : July 26, 2023
Distributer : Art House
Synopsis : July 26 follow each other and are not alike… It’s the day they met, the day they fell in love, the day they separated. Seven encounters between a professional dancer and a female taxi driver in today’s Tokyo.