by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $11.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Isabelle Huppert, Tsuyoshi Ihara, August Diehl
Intro:
… a really slight and under-written affair, and never approaches the quasi-Zen sublimity or artfulness its makers evidently intended.
Whatever its other strengths or failings, any film starring Isabelle Huppert can usually be assumed to at least have a strong central performance. Not this one, her effort seems ‘phoned in’, though to be fair, she didn’t have much of a script to work with.
Huppert plays Sidonie Perceval, a writer grieving the loss of her beloved husband. (He was killed in a car crash, a fate which had earlier befallen Sidonie’s parents and brother.) She flies from Paris to Japan, where her first book has been reissued, and is met by her – also bereft – publisher Kenzo Mizoguchi (Tsuyoshi Ihara).
What follows is sad, stylised and slow paced, which need not, of course, be bad things in themselves, but it’s also sometimes corny, soporific and weirdly unrealistic – for one thing, airports, streets (even in Tokyo) and train stations are all ridiculously devoid of people. Sidonie and Kenzo go to Kyoto and the art island of Nashima, among other places, and despite a quorum of culture clash, they become attracted to each other, though this is not reflected in any onscreen chemistry.
The only bit of implausibility here, which could be said to be intentional, involves Sidonie’s husband Antoine (August Diehl), whose ghost appears, or rather, becomes visible to her: he’d never left. There’s a marginal improvement in the dialogue when they chat, but it’s clutching at straws. You itch for someone – alive or dead – to get a bit more animated, but they don’t, even in the most (shall we say) potentially strenuous situation.
Sidonie In Japan has a lot of silence and a lot of nothing – like death, which is one of its main themes. It’s a really slight and under-written affair, and never approaches the quasi-Zen sublimity or artfulness its makers evidently intended. It’s eminently missable – except perhaps as a travelogue, because the Japanese scenery is very easy on the eye.
