Makoto Shinkai’s masterpiece in Russian box office
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An early film by the recognized leader of anime, Makoto Shinkai, “5 Centimeters Per Second,” will be released in Russia. The 2007 masterpiece is well known to Russian fans of the genre, but watching this melancholy poem about timid lovers on the big screen can make a movie fan happy in any circumstances, and on the eve of Valentine’s Day it is simply irreplaceable.
5 centimeters per second is the speed at which sakura leaves fly around. The title of the film in which Makoto Shinkai found his signature style clearly indicates his interests. He is Japanese to the core, and the weather and unusual states of nature are as important to him as the feelings of his chronically confused characters. In the last decade, Shinkai broke the box office, setting a record with the film Your Name (2016), showing that even in such hackneyed schemes as “a guy and a girl switching bodies” and “time travel”, you can find the seed for completely original plot. Starting from this film, his paintings acquire narrative virtuosity and begin to gravitate towards fantasy and fairy tales. The general public accepted this – and yet in the early films, “5 Centimeters Per Second” and “The Garden of Fine Words” (2013), with their simple and sad stories immersed in everyday life, Shinkai the author emerged more clearly. These are cartoons for those who don’t mind being sad and prefer the recognition of the real world to fantastic somersaults. And Shinkai is a master at reconstructing those special states that can be described by the old song of our musketeers “It’s nice to remember at sunset the love that was once forgotten.” However, the heroes of “5 Centimeters” did not even think of forgetting their first love – they were simply afraid to admit it.
The film is divided into three short stories, spaced in time between 1995 and 2008, united by one hero – Takagi Tono. In the first, he is a 13-year-old schoolboy, pining for his girlfriend from elementary school, who has moved to the town of Tochigi. They stay in touch, but soon Takagi’s parents will take him even further, to the island of Tanegashima, from where it will be even more difficult for him to get out. For the first time in his life, he independently arrives at Shinjuku Station to begin his journey from there with several transfers. They agreed to meet the girl at seven in the evening at Tochigi Station. However, the entire country is covered by heavy snow, which causes trains to be greatly delayed, and the last one gets stuck in a bare field.
Shinkai achieves a striking immersion in loneliness, showing how the capital’s huge stations give way to quiet provincial ones, while the trains become less and less modern: the last one, in which Takagi gets stuck, is indistinguishable from Soviet electric trains. It’s easy to recognize in the frozen boy yourself in your youth, a small person abandoned in the middle of an indifferent snowy night in a huge world.
The girl will still wait for him, and Takagi will even kiss her, and at the moment of the kiss she will understand “what eternity means, what the heart means, what the soul means.” But he will consider himself not entitled to drag her along with him, and they will never exchange the letters that they both prepared for each other.
In the next novel, Takagi is already graduating from high school and preparing to enter Tokyo University. The action takes place on the southern island of Tanegashima, and a different texture already rules here: the sea with its surfers and a rocket flying into the blue distance, which in 1999 was launched from a local space base to fly through the entire solar system. The perspective of presentation also shifts. If in the first novel the narrator was Takagi, then here the author’s voice belongs to a local girl who is in love with him. This one with her board was able to ride the wave, but never found the courage to confess her feelings to Takagi, telling herself that she could not make a guy happy whose gaze was always directed beyond the horizon.
In the third, Tokyo novella, the rocket returns to Earth, and all three heroes cross paths – but even so they manage to lose sight of each other. Takagi lives in melancholy, among beer and cigarettes, quits his job and admits to himself that in pursuit of a fragile dream he has deprived himself of his own happiness. There is a great song with the chorus: “I am always looking for you everywhere, I always catch your rainbow gaze, and again the night has flown by, and again the day comes, and again I did not say that I love you.”
Stubborn fans of Shinkai prefer the early period of his work, in which “5 Centimeters” was created, to the current, much more commercially successful one. However, they cannot agree on which film to give preference to: this or the plot-wise, more linear “Garden of Fine Words,” where a schoolboy met a woman drinking beer in a gazebo, and when their conversations began to develop into falling in love, he arrived at school and discovered that she is their new teacher. Still, “5 Centimeters” is more attractive precisely because it deliberately avoids the plot, becoming like a bird in the wind, which often flies through the Tokyo sky in the frame. This involuntary, randomness is extremely suited to a film about people who have not decided on happiness. Perhaps regret, a sense of missed opportunity, is not the mood most people go to the movies for. However, Shinkai, like no one else, knows how to make sadness and melancholy beautiful and even attractive. For him, they are like a delightful snowfall, which almost deprived the hero of a meeting with his first love. And yet it is not snow, and Takagi did not allow himself to be happy. Perhaps everyone regrets the missed opportunities in their lives. This is not something we are proud of, and yet it is good that there is a film that created a mood that did not exactly justify cowardice and indecision, but showed that these human gestures also contain their own sad beauty.
In theaters from February 8
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