Cannes at Home: Love in the time of COVID

by Cláudio Alves

Could Koji Fukada's THE REAL THING have been a Palme contender in 2020?

The second day at Cannes came and went, and the race for festival gold is on. Not just the prizes chosen by Park Chan-woo’s jury, mind you. In a rare move by the programmers, the Main Competition opened with two films that are also up for the Queer Palm. They are Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life. Neither was effusively received, but there are pockets of praise, even love, here and there. The latter has been getting especially high praise for Léa Drucker’s performance. And yet, this Main Competition might mean even more to the Japanese auteur who was among those selected for the festival edition that never was in 2020. At the time, Fukada was included among the returning cineastes and would’ve likely experienced his first go at the Palme d’Or if not for the COVID lockdown.

So, it only seems appropriate to consider his film that would’ve played at the Croisette six years ago, a near four-hour epic love story named The Real Thing. And to keep things thematically cohesive, let’s also remember Bourgeois-Tacquet's 2021 Critics’ Week selection, Anaïs in Love…

THE REAL THING (2020) Koji Fukada

Though adapted from a Mochiru Hoshisato manga, The Real Thing is the sort of story that feels custom-made for Koji Fukada’s cinema. The narrative is pretty simple in its basic premise, mostly echoing beats we’ve seen in a thousand other tales of romance and toxic love. Boy meets girl. Girl is nothing but trouble. Boy falls in love anyway. Obstacles appear, and then are overcome. When a happy ending feels near, another boy from the girl’s past appears. She returns to him, leaving her new beloved behind. Something else happens, of course, but let’s allow the film to keep its denouement close to the chest. All in all, the table’s set for a conventional romantic comedy dipping its toes in drama, mayhap some tragedy, too.

But of course, this is a Koji Fukada flick. The man is known to zag when you expect him to zig, twisting the tonalities of what should be a pretty commonplace plot to the point that the familiar becomes defamiliarized and you’re left staring at the screen whilst feeling alienated and… compelled? The Real Thing is quick to introduce the viewer to these wily moods, presenting a meet cute that’s more of a meet ugly when, one night, office worker Tsuji comes across a woman, Ukiyo, behaving strangely at the convenience store. Before a new day begins, he’s saved her life on the train tracks and a whole rental car service side plot has been sparked into action as some sort of bizarre cupid or, perhaps more accurately, a variation on the red string of fate. 

Were this a Hollywood movie, Ukiyo might have been called a manic pixie dream girl. However, The Real Thing isn’t that sort of production. What we get, instead, is a character whose oddities feel less like a way for the filmmakers to endear us to her and more akin to a challenge set by the storyteller to his audience. Rather than whimsical charm, the idea conveyed is that of essential unknowability between each and every one of us. There is also the question of what a romance might look like when that concept is foregrounded. Indeed, many passages in The Real Thing can come across as Fukada workshopping ideas he’d explore in more concentrated ways in his 2022 Love Life.

Part of it is that this manga adaptation is much more sprawling than the latter movie, encompassing a cast of characters that’s ever expanding as one would assume from a near-four-hour behemoth that also found a home as a miniseries on Japanese TV. For instance, Ukiyo’s troubles are varied, often swerving the film into temporary genre dead-ends, as when The Real Thing becomes a crime picture for a while. And then, there’s Tsuji’s romantic and sexual life, an Eustachian conundrum that brings about memories of the Nouvelle Vague - his relationship with an older co-worker has strong echoes of The Mother and the Whore. That’s before the film shapeshifts near the end, becoming a variation on Antonioni-esque emptiness that gives Kaho Tsuchimura’s performance as Ukiyo a proto-Vitti quality.

For all that I’m appealing to European cinema of the 60s and 70s, The Real Thing gets contemporary relationships – and, I assume, some specific Japanese social mores – in ways few texts do nowadays, embracing the vicissitudes of casual sex and the dreaded situationship as a roadblock to love or, sometimes, an end in and of itself. The evolution of the central bond is exquisite, too, weaponizing the titanic length of the unfolding story. Because The Real Thing is so long, you can feel how gradually Ukiyo carves a place for herself in Tsuji’s life without even meaning to occupy said place, how his existence slowly shapes itself around her presence. Later, when roles are reversed, her life will, in turn, be molded by his absence.

Fukada thus presents a story that’s not so much about love in conventional romantic terms as about choice. The text cyclically returns to the weight of choosing a path, choosing someone, and living with one’s own decision. There’s a lot here about the derangement of love, irrational in its essence, yet an understanding that everyone wants to be needed in emotional and practical terms. Much is said about picking between safety and the dangers of “the real thing,” but the latter’s definition is mutable, too. By the end, it seems the key to making an impossible couple work is for both lovers to be equally in need of one another and equally self-aware of that necessity. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another film articulate it that way. In that regard, The Real Thing is on a league of its own.

Then again, I want to continue the reference game and appeal to Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman to explain the impact of a row that starts in the kitchen, involves a knife stab, and leaves an assortment of sliced greenery scattered across the floor. It’s a great disruption, a testament to Fukada’s audiovisual discipline and how the deployment of rigid, repetitive mise-en-scène is a deliberate prelude to breaks in form along the way. Still, even in those first hours, when a certain audiovisual tedium sets in, there are moments that take one’s breath away for a second or two. As when an encounter with a loan shark ends in a lingering shot of the prostrated would-be lovers, low to the ground, their panic reflected and distorted in a car’s shiny black surface.

In another scene, a story of rape is told in a traveling master shot, placid and pastoral. The brutality of the acts described and the dismissiveness with which they’re received are at odds with the image, with the gentility of the woman sharing the tale. It’s the collision of someone who’s full of empathy and another who is unwilling to extend grace to those he finds guilty of causing their own misfortune. It’s also one of the most shocking scenes in Fukada’s filmography, all the more impactful because of his direction’s soft touch. It blows anything in the director’s more famous Harmonium out of the water, that’s for sure. In fact, considering every merit and small miracle, I might be so bold as to declare The Real Thing as Fukada’s magnum opus. 

The Real Thing is streaming on Hoopla, Fawesome, and the Roku Channel. You can also rent or purchase it from Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

ANAÏS IN LOVE (2020) Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet

Sometimes, all a film needs to do is deliver a striking first impression and end on its best material. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Anaïs in Love certainly does that. Indeed, its first shot is almost impressionistic and could well be shown as a video installation on the walls of the Musée d’Orsay. In it, as a piano swirls and twirls across the soundtrack, the titular Anaïs sprints out of a flower shop and down some Parisian street, bouquet in hand. The movement is sudden, leaving no place to breathe or for the viewer to get their bearings. On screen, everything smears in a kinetic flux, vivid petals transfigured into thick paintbrush strokes, while the sunlight streaming down white stone buildings suggests watercolor stains.

Sadly, the rushing camera is the only interesting idiom in the film’s visual vocabulary. The cinematography is beautiful throughout, but the mise-en-scène rarely does anything with this photographic quality beyond indulging in indifferent postcard prettiness. Oh well, there are worse things in life. Putting up with Anaïs might be worse. At least, for the first act of what is, ostensibly, a light comedy meant to delight in the manner of a cinematic amuse bouche. Instead of such pleasures, the opening half hour, gorgeous rushing colors aside, is a chore to get through as Borgeouis-Tacquet throws every cliché at the screen, to the point Anaïs in Love can be diagnosed as terminally French on the verge of self-parody, with a title character to match. 

You see, this is one of those stories of beautiful young things drifting through Parisian life, insouciant and obstinate in equal measure, even a little bit entitled and oh-so grating to this viewer. She calls herself a woman without principles and is agile in redirecting every conversation back to her solipsistic musings about love and sex and infidelity, the sheer aimlessness of her present existence. She is always running late, always running past the boundaries and sensibilities of those who fawn about her, those charmed by some mysterious magnetism I can’t quite grasp. Anaïs Demoustier does what she can with the role, but, for far too long, she seems to only present a series of supposedly endearing behavioral quirks rather than a character. 

Things feel like they’ll change when news of her mother’s returning cancer shakes Anaïs a fair bit, but it’s the presence of another older woman in her orbit that transforms the youth’s story and gives the film purpose, shape, a heartbeat. Obviously, this was all part of Borgeouis-Tacquet’s design, and it’s hard to argue that the script’s gradual reveal of its true depth is an ineffective strategy. The writer-director takes her audience on a journey, expanding one’s perspective of Anaïs as these not-so-fleet-footed 98 minutes go by and the film’s relationship toward its central character grows from passive enchantment to something sharper, not necessarily censorious but, at the very least, ambivalent. 

Who is this woman who shakes Anaïs in Love’s foundations, you may ask? She’s Émilie, a novelist played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in what might be my favorite performance of those I’ve seen from the Italian star. Her natural tendency toward whispered, yet oppressive, melancholy, a fragile demeanor with a touch of naïve carnality and a good splash of self-pity has rarely found a better vehicle. Or a director more willing to see what it could offer a text that’s not obviously constructed in the image of that on-screen persona. Whether it’s a great feat of casting or directing, or a triumph of an actress’ individual solutions, is immaterial.

What matters is that, when you’d expect control, there’s a watery volatility that’s never too forcefully stated. When you’d expect an adamant, articulate rejection played against her scene partner, she gets comfortably lost within her own words. Tedeschi and her Émilie pull Anäis in Love into a slippery conversation about the difference between predetermined assumptions of character and personality types and what is actually on screen. Through that internal dialogue, the film further complicates and reflects on what’s happening with Anäis and this mentor cum lover. We start to muse on who she wants to see when she looks at the older woman, versus the reality of who stares back. 

Also, Demoustier is all the better when Anaïs is focused, when she stops running aimlessly and acquires a set destination. Maybe that is love. Maybe that’s self-deception projected outward. Are we ever in love or merely under the illusion of it, born out of a desire to feel something that’s bigger than ourselves, selfish and selfless in the same breath? An eleventh-hour talk between the two women sees the film weighing these possibilities as it reframes the juvenalia of the preceding narrative and even justifies it to a point. That grating folly of youth is naught but a form of seizing the moment before time passes and a demanding spirit cools down into quiet contentment. And that process is not a tragedy nor a fairytale ending, not a slap in the face nor a silver screen fantasy, unless… Well, I’ll let you reach your own conclusions.

Anaïs in Love is streaming on Kanopy, Hoopla, Plex, Xumo Play, and Fandango at Home. You can also rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.

Are you excited for Fukada and Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new projects? And, if you’ve seen their past works, what’s your impression of them as filmmakers?