Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023) ‘MIFF’ Movie Review: There’s something undeniably lovely and refreshing in watching stories in a film sprout and peck into each other. Stories teeming in wackiness gain another meta-textual layer of resonance as they curl into each other, defying constructed authorial boundaries predicating a particular character and setting. Pierre Foldes’ directorial manages to tap this unique spirit of cinematic, animated fiction that playfully fuses eccentricity with elemental human feelings of crippling self-loathing and inadequacy. He transplants several stories from Haruki Murakami into a wondrous hybrid that packs strains of plaintiveness within the folds of sublime weirdness.
Foldes has located the exact pulse of the material whereby he orchestrates a rich disregard for rules, moving primarily between two narrative tracks, generously importing motifs and defining characteristics from Murakami’s other works as well. He also has great fun with elements of visual foreboding. In an early scene, the Tokyo security bank officer, Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo), travels on the tube when he has a sudden hallucinatory vision of the train turning into a tunnel-shaped worm.
Foldes cannily throw in such cues to establish a critical plot feature. Foldes begins his film in the week following the 2011 Tokyo earthquake and tsunami. The news is flooded with harrowing accounts and testimonies of people recounting hearing voices from underneath. The trauma has seeped inextricably into the national consciousness, and Foldes cleverly builds the ground for a hyperreality where the shock, which is still too fresh, diffuses everyday perceptions of living and being.
Komura (Ryan Bommarito), also a bank employee, watches his wife, Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder), spend days glued to the television, consuming the barrage of distressing visuals, often skipping sleep. We also sense that their marriage has somewhat frayed, neither articulating the emotional and psychological stress of the situation. Kyoko looks almost hollowed out in her perturbation which she refuses to share with Komura.
One evening, Komura returns home from work to find her gone with a note saying she won’t be back and requesting him not to try reaching out. She states she did not have any complaints about him. However, hints that the very nondescriptness of their marriage might be why she is cutting ties. In a shattering line, she asserts living with him was like living with a chunk of air. This line haunts Komura as we follow him on his journey.
A still from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023)Komura and Katagiri never share a conversation directly, but they are strongly bound in what they sense as their own inconsequentiality and unremarkableness. When Komura is seeking leave from work, his boss reminds him that despite it being several years since he first joined the office, he has remained in exactly the same position. Throughout the course of the film, Komura reiterates he is quite content. But there is an unmistakable tinge of thickly concealed discontent hovering in the show of his words. He does not actively hate his work or is drawn to any motivation to do better and climb the ladder.
Katagiri is more acutely aware of and even articulates in a bitter, anguished monologue the drabness his life has become filled with. One evening, he finds a massive frog waiting for him at home. The frog has dire news, requesting him to team up and prevent a bigger earthquake that would soon happen.
Amusingly, this is a frog with impeccable manners, liberally quoting everyone from Nietzsche to Conrad, not hiding its displeased judgment when Katagiri confesses not having read Anna Karenina. Katagiri and Frog’s track offers a sweet and amiable counterpoint to the dourness that permeates Komura’s story of world-weary resignation. In Frog, Katagiri finds a companionship he has never had.
At its heart, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman is about the enigma of other people, our relationship with others recast through a lens of the intermittently outrageous absurdity that punctuates life, dreams, and nervous uncertainties blending into an indistinguishable reverie. In this world, the passers-by register only as amorphous outlines.
I have not read the original stories that are made into the film. Nevertheless, Foldes’ telling unravels with delicious, delightful layers of unpredictability, managing to land the most whimsical detours with emotional authenticity and visual wit. Particularly, the imaginings of Katagiri and Komura are incredibly rich, creating a palpable unease. There are visions of a gigantic worm sleeping underground whose anger can cause an earthquake and a blue cat with sharp features slinking around beyond grasp. Male sexual appetite is refracted through similar exaggerated, beastlike imagery thrust upon women.
The stories retain a taste for the inexplicable, despite the promise of closure in certain circumstances. The film, with its indulgence in both the cheerfully and bleakly bizarre, springs many a delight.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2023.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023) Movie Voice Cast: Marcello Arroyo, Michael Czyz, Zag Dorison, Földes, Jesse Noah Gruman, Katharine King So, John Vamvas, Nadia Verrucci & Shoshana Wilder
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023) Movie Genre: Fantasy/Animation, Runtime: 1h 50m
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