Like
your local cable provider, Yoko Suzuki’s arrival window is measured in years,
but at least she will wait patiently for days if you happen to be out of the
house. Patience comes naturally to an android, but her curiosity develops over
time. The mortal humans using her services are strange indeed. Sion Sono cranks
things down for his austere, low-fi post-Fukushima science fiction allegory The Whispering Star (trailer here), which screens
during this year’s Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film in New York.
The
singularity has come to pass, but with a whimper rather than a bang. Evidently,
the invention of teleportation made humanity so lazy, it is nearly rendered us extinct,
largely leaving the universe to androids like Suzuki. She has been on a fourteen-year
mission to deliver old school packages to humans strewn throughout the known
universe. Why do they hire her services, often for trivial shipments they could
easily zap across space? She would like to know that herself.
As
if Sono’s ascetic vision were not surreal enough, he gives everything further
layers of significance by filming the scenes of deserted alien worlds in abandoned
Fukushima neighborhoods, using displaced locals as his supporting cast.
Admittedly, very little actually happens, but it always looks disconcertingly
eerie. Hideo Yamamoto’s black-and-white cinematography is often starkly beautiful,
especially during the arresting final sequence.
There
is no question Whispering Star represents
the auteur at his auteuriest. However, the quiet power of (Sono’s wife and “muse”)
Megumi Kagurazaka as Suzuki cannot be overstated. She subtly but undeniably
commands the screen. The film is also a minor triumph of prop and set design,
particularly the Levittown-ish tract house style space freighter Suzuki
commands. It is ridiculously whimsical, yet looks more real than most early
1980s Star Wars knock-offs.
