Complete first draft for Reverse Shot.
In Yoko Yamanaka's 2017 feature debut, Amiko, the young teenage protagonist has a day-long conversation with a boy who she sees as a fellow outsider. During this tête-à-tête, Amiko brings up the idea of a day that comes around every year where a person doesn't care about anything, leaving them open and susceptible to the most extreme possibilities. That sense of impulsiveness, borne of both apathy and a certain kind of freedom, seems to characterize Yamanaka's approach to cinema. The 28-year-old director has made two features to date, along with a few short films and some contributions to television programs, yet her body of work already contains the number of formal gambits and tonal shifts that would be expected from a significantly more experienced filmmaker.
Yamanaka's return to feature filmmaking comes in the form of Desert of Namibia, which at 138 minutes nearly doubles the runtime of her first film. Unlike the flagrant, flighty time jumps of Amiko, which skips across an entire year within its first half hour, Desert of Namibia follows, at least initially, a more forthrightly conventional approach to narrative time, beginning with a slow zoom-in on 21-year-old Kana (Yuumi Kawai) as she ambles along an elevated Tokyo walkway. When she arrives at a coffee shop, her friend begins by exclaiming that a former classmate had taken her own life. Kana is less interested in this line of thought, and eventually the film's focus turns briefly to an adjacent table of men talking about a fondue restaurant where the servers don't wear panties and mirrors line the floor. There is no direct interaction between our heroine and this group, the restaurant is never brought up again, and indeed Kana's friend is only really around for this sequence. Yet this opening scene, a collection of details thoroughly inessential for any semblance of ordinary character progression, acts as a version of the film in miniature, ruled as it is by Kana's ever-shifting emotional reactions and whims.
This is not to say that Desert of Namibia is devoid of serious psychological development or narrative incident. The first night the viewer spends with Kana, taking up a fluid 15-minute span, carefully establishes her live-in boyfriend Honda (Kanichiro) and secret lover Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko) in reverse order, and despite the former's care for her after she returns from a drunken night out with the latter, it quickly becomes clear that the official relationship is winding down. In between shifts as a hair-removal specialist at a salon, Kana slowly but surely edges away from stability in favor of what ultimately proves to be a significantly more volatile relationship.
Yamanaka does not aim for pat, simplistic psychological explanations for her heroine's choices. Desert of Namibia thrums with energy, carefully observing Kana and her companions in intimate handheld medium shots before suddenly bursting forth in a barrage of electronic music, an unexpected character interaction, or a simple expression of motion. Gradually, as Kana and Hayashi's interactions grow more violent, usually at her instigation, the viewer's involvement with her—in terms of sheer time spent in the company of someone who is, especially as embodied by Kawai's abundance of diffident charisma, a pleasure to watch—makes it difficult to reject her, instead increasing the desire to understand an unknowable person.
Desert of Namibia's character intentions can be inferred thanks to two especially prominent casting choices. When Kana tries to see if she has a mental disorder, the therapist is played by Ayaka Shibutani, an actor who has thus far only appeared in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films, including as one of the meek glamping representatives in Evil Does Not Exist. Even more significantly, Kana's next-door neighbor, who appears in a few, liberatory passages, is played by Erika Karata, the actor in the titular role of Asako I & II who was nearly black balled from the Japanese film/TV industry for her affair with Masahiro Higashide, her co-star in Hamaguchi's film. The presence of these actors indicates a certain resonance that goes beyond simple cinephilia: a kind but only somewhat effectual air of rationality and control on the one hand, and a free, almost otherworldly spirit on screen and in real life, consequences be damned on the other.
Desert of Namibia takes its name from a livestream of a watering hole that Kana watches on her phone at several points, and the relevance of the images to the film's title is more than matched by the mystery of what she sees in it: a moment of calm? An escape from the bustle of urban life? A more appealing, primal state of existence? So it goes, too, for several metacinematic ruptures—some more overt than others—which fracture the film and go ever further in evoking Kana's vacillations between intense emotional involvement and bored detachment. The final scene, which features something of a rapprochement, presents what appears to be a literal shift in perspective, a step through the looking glass where the final spoken words—"I don't understand"—are a compliment rather than a complaint, a guiding principle for a remarkably protean director still in the making.
