When the Locarno Film Festival at the end of July unveiled the director Naomi Kawase (Hitchhiking,, The Mourning Forest) New movie LLLUSSION OF YAKUSHMA (Iluxilo), with none other than Vicky Krieps (Bodice,, The dead do not hurt,, Hot milk), As a late add to his competition programming, he was considered a surprise and a coup.
We did not know much about the film, but the involvement of two big names in an independent film had intrigued the initiates of the industry.
“Corry, French coordinator of pediatric cardiac transplants, is sent to Japan where organ donation remains taboo”, reads a synopsis of the film on the website of the Locarno festival. “While she is fighting to save a young boy, her partner Jin, a Yakushima photographer, suddenly disappears. He becomes a” Johatsu “, while the Japanese call the 80,000 people who disappear overnight every year. Corry faces a double ordeal: saving a child by facing the loss of the man she loves.”
As Kawase says in a note by a director: “Through the eyes of a foreign medicine professional, this story weaves time and space to reveal post-payic changes in the human connection and the lasting opinions of Japan on life and death have been transmitted to future generations.”
Johatsu, or “evaporation”, is the word for the Japanese who voluntarily disappear to escape difficult situations, in particular financial debt, family conflicts or social pressures.
Krieps, depicting Corry, features with Kanichiro of Japan like Jin in the French, Japanese and English film which is a co -production between France, Japan, Belgium and Luxembourg. Cinefrance International manages international sales.
Before the world premiere of the film on Friday, Kawase and Krieps spoke to THR about LLLUSSION OF YAKUSHMAHis inspirations, their collaboration and the presentation of a film full of heart to a world full of conflicts.
“During the coconut, with all the borders closed and everything, I really thought of the way people can connect with each other,” explains Kawase THR via a translator. “At the same time, I thought of the situations in which people are separated from each other, including this phenomenon of” evaporation “, people who disappear, then later from cardiac transplants. In the case of heart transplants, this means that children can die in front of their parents. ” In both cases, Johatsu and heart transplants, “we have a very specific situation in Japan where families have a certain control when they decide the death of these family members,” said Kawase.
Breaking Krieps was an opportunity to bring an accomplished actress who can help add a point of view of a stranger to the film. “When I discussed with my French agent how to manage these very specific conditions in Japan through more objective perspectives, the name of Vicky Krieps appeared in the conversation.”
Krieps was happy to take up the challenge. “Shortly before the film, I felt a vocation. Suddenly, Japan was in my mind,” she said THR. “I don’t know why and I remember saying someone,” I think I have to go to Japan. And probably a week later, I received a call from a French agent that Naomi was looking for an actress, and I went for a hearing because I thought I had to go and meet this woman.
That and the idea of going to Japan “had the impression of being under a spell or an enchantment,” recalls the actress. “It is perhaps culture and the old traditions that are so powerful, and how Japan takes care of ghosts.”
Krieps had just lost someone “extremely close to me” before reading the script, so it was natural to play the role. “It was not like a cast. We met, and we both knew that we had a similar understanding of death and perhaps ghosts and the bond of nature, life and death, “explains Krieps.
Kawase often mixes the eye of a documentary maker with a fiction for a unique style. She brought the same approach to LLLUSSION OF YAKUSHMA. “In most of my films, I really have my characters and spend time as part of the film,” explains the filmmaker THR. “In this case, Vicky stayed at the hospital where we pulled for a while, and she was actually wearing the doctor’s clothes, had her own office and she would interact with the children there.”
The children actors in the film did the same. “They would move with IV and everything, as if they were really patients in the hospital,” added Kawase. “In this context, communication and interaction have really occurred naturally.” Certain real interactions of this period have made the final dialogue of the film.
Naomi Kawase
With the kind permission of Leslie Kee
“We were very free to explore every moment as a moment,” explains Krieps THR. “Some dialogues in a scene would be improvised. For example, something I said to Jin was half the improvisation.”
She even found herself to get lost in the moment and this world. “I sometimes have the impression of talking to the trees, and I am in my past and present life which was close to sorrow, or let’s say that I cry in a way that I am very aware of my sorrow,” shares Krieps. “So sometimes I didn’t know what time it was, and I was right there. I think that’s what makes him if a documentary style, in addition to [the fact that] Some of the people around us were real doctors. So there was always a mixture of two worlds. »»
The Japanese title of the film includes the Japanese word for the illusion, but its meaning differs from the English meaning. “It is something like an illusion that was in the past, which is a little different,” said Kawase. “It is even more twisted than the English title, because the Japanese title essentially says that the illusion is not there, but it was also there. It is therefore a kind of combination of this sense of reality, but also of the imagination which almost looks like a dream. And therefore it really goes.”
For example, did Jin really exist in the real world? “So it deals with this experience that certain things happen, and you don’t really know what is real or not, and it’s almost a paradox in this sense,” said Kawase. “There are many layers, which are often very intentionally ambiguous.”
Krieps presents himself: “Who are we to know what is real and what is not real and what really existed? Once everything has disappeared, everything becomes an illusion. ”
By emphasizing the heart and connections, LLLUSSION OF YAKUSHMA Feels like a very opportune film. How does Kawase think about it? “Because of Covid’s shared experience, people really wanted to connect, having real links with people,” said the filmmaker. “But what really happened is that there is more and more division. People become more egocentric, and consequently, to the exclusion of the other, from otherness. So, through the film, I really want to try to connect people who died, who are dead and those who are still alive, for example, and children who can only live in a hospital.
Concludes Kawase: “The character Corry is a foreign element that enters this hospital environment. But in a way, this foreign element also brings new perspectives and values, which can, when things are connected, help people go towards something better. So it was in a way the hope that I had. “
And Krieps proposed: “The film has many meanings, and we are talking about heart, in the sense of opening your heart.”
Concluded the star: “I think what society suffers mainly is that people become more and more alone because they cannot connect to the heart level. And progress, in terms of technology, move super-rapids, but the heart rate slows down, and that creates a large crevasse.”
