Yui Kiyohara First Draft

Complete first draft for Screen Slate.

The eponymous dwelling of Yui Kiyohara's feature debut, 2017's Our House, provides a useful synecdoche for the Japanese director's two films to date: an unassuming concrete exterior gives way via an opaque plastic sliding door to an interior full of tatami mats, creaking wooden beams, and shoji that serves as the site for tranquility, eeriness, mystery, and restoration all at the same time. Such contradictory sensations feel intrinsic to this small yet fascinating body of work, which is complemented by 2022's Remembering Every Night; both were shown during the Berlinale Forum, and both will be receiving a theatrical release courtesy of KimStim beginning today, with the 2-for-1 double feature pricing at Film at Lincoln Center offering a unique opportunity to delve into these works. Kiyohara's films are, first and foremost, centered around the structure of their narratives and the attendant influence on characters and setting. Running a slender 80 minutes, Our House interweaves the stories of two duos of women — a daughter and her mother and two women who meet by chance, one of whom is suffering from amnesia — who, in what appears to be a case of parallel realities, live in the same space. The 115-minute Remembering Every Night opts for both an expansion and a simplification of this concept: taking place in Tama New Town, a satellite city of Tokyo that ranks as the nation's largest housing project, the film follows three women from different generations over the course of a day as their paths glancingly intersect: an unemployed visitor approaching middle-age, a gas meter inspector trying to help out an elderly man, and a university student commemorating the anniversary of a childhood friend's death. Kiyohara's work thrives on such glancing connections, on carefully chosen parallels that match less in similarity of events than in an abiding spirit of curiosity and discovery. Accordingly, these take on different forms, with the divergences going some way in detailing the dexterity and adaptability of Kiyohara's style to her different narratives. On the one hand, Our House verges into the vaguely paranormal, as the parallel worlds often intersect with phantom sounds and objects. It is worth noting that it served as her graduation film at Tokyo University of the Arts, where she studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and the steadiness of tone between realities and the overlapping climaxes of the film approach the thrilling calm of his work. Meanwhile, the delight of chance encounters in Remembering Every Night leads to a more overtly dynamic and unpredictable experience, where the initial hand-off moments between the three protagonists are triggered by the oldest woman's endearingly clumsy moments of free activity. Sudden flourishes and shifts of emphases rule the day, epitomized most beautifully in a montage of home movie birthday celebrations assembled by a tertiary character. It is here that the title comes to apply to this film that unfolds over a single day, expanding the focus to encompass an even greater swath of shared human experience in a way that thrums with emotional resonance. Remembering Every Night retracts after this, yet in a way that, like the final scene and perfectly timed cut-to-black of its predecessor, further pierces the already porous boundaries between storylines and the women that populate them. In the opening scene of Our House, a euphoric dance between young teenagers is interrupted by an unseen presence; in a closing scene of its successor, the visitor observes a youthful sparkler display, close enough to reach out but precluded by propriety and generation gaps to join in. This is the great generosity of Kiyohara's cinema: even if direct contact between narratives isn't possible, it is palpable and deeply felt all the same.