The clean and well-organized business environs of Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights seem to come straight from the catalogue; the city skyline casts an ambient evening glow; each member of the professional class is wearing an in-style ensemble; the soundtrack is a recurring theme of anodyne electronic hums. This is the kind of atmosphere to attract tourists with, but it’s also a soft cushion for Miyake’s main maneuver as a dramatist. In this tailored environment, the film’s two protagonists will, repeatedly and without warning, react to a word, sound, or invisible stimulus and unsettle all decorum — guards go up, colleagues warn, cajole, and react with surprise, and the fragility of this oppressive calm is proven with each “scene” caused by Fujisawa (Mone Kamishiraishi) and Yamazoe (Hokuto Matsumura).
This isn’t their intention — they are supposed to be in a recovery drama, but find themselves in a business ad in which every wrong move is a daylight nightmare. This begins with their diagnoses, of severe PMS for Fujisawa and panic disorder for Yamazoe. Their prescriptions (herbal remedies, alprazolam, “take it easy,” etc.) aren’t completely ineffective, but like the kind thoughts received from the few family members who know, these register as a burden, a weight that makes both people — Fujisawa in particular — feel worse. This is compounded by their parallel career descents, which land them both at a “product management” company whose main client is the manufacturer of child astronomy sets — a far cry from the corner office aspirations they might have held months prior.
Miyake has chosen to shoot the film, like his similarly confined boxing drama Small, Slow But Steady, on 16mm, which allows for the warm and attractive capturing of natural light, but the question baked into this kind of approach is how, exactly, can the film work if these experiences are, outside of the breakdown scenes, completely invisible, and replaced by a fine-tuned glow of sincerity. One imagines the source for the film, a novel by Maiko Seo, approaches things like the early section of the film before the two meet. Fujisawa narrates, we gather, not just because the film requires some exposition, but because she has no one else besides an imagined audience that she can safely deliver her internal monologues to. When Yamazoe arrives and their friendship develops — coincidental encounters in the aftermath of their respective workplace outbursts — this private pain becomes transposed to discreet and polite dialogue.
Miyake appears to have a clear idea about what he wants to capture, and despite the well-researched specificities of his characters, a strong argument could be made that his aim is societal. In a more bracing film, the threat of these characters’ exclusion from society could be more apparent, and perhaps a better film would find a way to express their anxieties in a way that didn’t flip between incident and leisure time like the pages of a pamphlet. But Miyake subtly tries to limn out this problem beyond his central duo: we see that there is, it appears, a social program or community center for every target demo in society, which means that seniors and single people and the severely isolated all, presumably, have a drop-in activity a few blocks away — an alienation solution with very little hope of lively spontaneity. Scenes involving characters who, unlike Fujisawa and Yamazoe, haven’t seen their private fears turn into material traps — debts and obligations — are given a careful amount of detail, but it’s also here that the film becomes dangerously close to something like the worst aspects of Agnès Varda’s Faces Places, in which the difference between public art and corporate seminar is blurred. (Similarly, the decompression ritual that the film’s protagonists bond over — washing cars — seems arbitrarily chosen.)
As in Small, Slow But Steady, Miyake also floats the social expectation of romance — a key component to many a generic recovery narrative — before letting it drift past unexplored. The key virtue of All the Long Nights — a practically unmissable one — is that it depicts something rarely taken up: a brief connection between two people that doesn’t extravagantly change their lives, yet registers in a way that holds a highly specific meaning. Miyake seems to want to thread back and forth between proposed societal solutions and their more nuanced individual take-up, but in a way that never fully meshes with the behavioral impact of the film’s most jarring scenes. The breakdowns do continue, we see, but the two protagonists’ efforts — the ways they learn about each other and slowly ease into each others’ habitual space — mitigate the lost and alienated experience that would have accompanied every step of their routines at the start of the film. The profundity of this mixture of social observation and novel-plotting busywork might depend on how much one imagines incremental adjustments and temporary companionship act as viable salves for societal problems.
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