Voice, by Yukiko Mishima. The review

For Yukiko Mishima, only the daily micro-dramas of life count, the inflections (emotional, existential, and even narrative) that take shape in the meshes of an apparently immobile, placid routine, where the static progression of time and space overlaps with emotional universe of characters completely absorbed in their fragility. Almost as if they were stuck in a loops perennial traumatic, which leaves no room for any fantasy of vitality, precisely because it does not seem to present – at least at first glance – a conclusion nor a possible resolution. And in the case of a film like Voicecharacterized by three segments that are only thematically (and therefore not narratively) interconnected, the advent of mourning intervenes to filter these questions: and the need, on the part of the characters who experience it, not to give in to the weight of that suffering which risks, inexorably , to crush them.

Although the three stories that make up this triptych do not have any figure in common, much less the plot, the feeling of unity and cohesion on which Voice constructs its own plan is given by the sharing of the same theme, but above all by the naturalness with which these segments convey the reference themes according to the same dramaturgical strategy. Although the three protagonists appear separated by obvious differences, both personal and purely identity-based, what places them in continuity with each other is precisely the “homologous” nature of the conflicts they are going through, and the univocal direction towards which the filmmaker directs their processes of traumatic resolution. From this perspective, the transsexual father (Maki Carrousel) unable to metabolize the loss of his firstborn, the middle-aged pastor (the iconic Shō Aikawa) committed to mending his relationship with his daughter, and the young woman suffocated by the consequences of abuse childish (played by the extraordinary Atsuko Maeda of To the Ends of the Earth) are all in the same existential condition, despite their stories – both life and “narrative” – ​​following singular and exclusive paths.

Here then is Mishima, to avoid wedging Voice in the inconsistencies (however present) into which episodic films usually risk sinking, it starts from a sharing of the traumatic matrix, to offer a material connotation to the conflict, which thus takes on not only the physical and “tactile” features with which the characters ( and spectators) can interface, but it also appears repeated over time, so as to cross contiguously, like a common thread, the three segments of which the narrative is made up. It is thus, then, that in the first two parts of the film, the sea becomes the symbol of trauma, the scenographic – and symbolic – element that reminds the protagonists of the nature of their pain, allowing them, thanks to its static and immanent presence (visualised in the field in the initial segment, and declined in the sound horizon in the following episode) to deal with the very materialization of the suffering that afflicts them. And to offer, at the same time, a physical element that allows the story to exhibit a radical clash of forces; and for those watching to invest emotionally in a conflict that appears increasingly credible and cohesive.

A strategy, this just outlined, which returns in the final act – the most extensive and brilliant of Voice – in the form of a drawn image, with the portrait of the young Reiko’s face which brings to light, in the woman’s eyes, the very matrix of her disagreement: that is, the difficulty of perceiving the “paternity” of her body. And although the two initial segments appear decidedly flatter and less evocative than the final fraction, Mishima channels all the best instances of his cinema in the third episode: until he finds in the complicity between two emotionally distant people, the recipe with which to eviscerate intimacy of souls so mercilessly solitary.