Hikaru onna

Thanks to Sōmai ’s expressive style and ambitious directing, this kitschy story of innocent simpletons in the rotten big city takes the form of a magnificent symbolist fairy tale that amplifies the naïveté and theatricality of the story, while also transforming it into a captivatingly fascinating fantasy. The questionable corners of Tokyo and the gallery of eccentric outcasts that inhabit them are transformed into romanticised caricatures that enchant the viewer. The high and the low blend together here in hyper-aestheticised operatic surrealism, a full range of genres mix without inhibition and raw, pure emotions rule over everything. In other words, Sōmai created, in a Japanese setting, an equivalent of the French cinéma du look movement, or rather one element of it, represented by the big-city fantasies of Leos Carax (actually his whole filmography), Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, The Moon in the Gutter, IP5: The Island of Pachyderms) and Luc Besson (Subway). If we develop the line of thought on the side of cinema as a mutually enriching dialogue between films and filmmakers, we can see reflections of Sōmai’s Luminous Woman not only in Carax’s phenomenal The Lovers on the Bridge released four years later, but primarily in the generation-younger major project and generational cult film Swallowtail & Butterfly, whose director, Shunji Iwai, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa have been cited as the filmmakers who appear to have taken the most inspiration from Sōmai’s work. In his film, Sōmai transports viewers to the world of illegal wrestling, but in a fantastically stylised form in which the circus, jugglers and opera come together alongside wrestling, all watched by an audience dressed in formal wear. Here he develops a romantic triangle involving a simpleton from the countryside who has come to Tokyo to find his fiancée. As he finds out that she has irretrievably surrendered to the enticements of the big city, he becomes close to an opera singer, whose heart he must win from a villainous illusionist. As in Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion, Sōmai  stylises the whole narrative in spectacularly artificial vignettes, thus enhancing the fantastical nature and unreality of the narrative. In addition to the pastel colour filters and his trademark long dolly shots, he makes maximum use of the layout of the setting. In the exteriors, he plentifully shoots long sequences on the streets without restricting the passers-by, thus using their authentic reactions to draw attention to the staged action in front of the camera. The interior sequences are almost downright theatrical, with ingenious sets that add additional image plans through movement of the camera and the scene. After all, it is not only in this respect that Luminous Woman has another parallel in Francis Ford Coppola’s unjustly ignored musical experiment One From the Heart, which is also distinguished by identically spectacular, fascinating, alienating and difficult techniques. (2022.07.25)