With enough practice, seemingly anything can become normal, even the working practice of Shunji Iwai. For the better part of his career, Iwai’s melodramas of adolescence and young adulthood have followed two courses: unconventional adaptation from his own novels, and the casting of prominent pop industry performers in starring roles. These tendencies suggest a method that requires potentially volatile, extracinematic elements. Where the fiction-writing process as an early draft has served filmmakers as diverse as Rohmer, Sembène, and Breillat well, with Iwai it’s worth noting that his books range wildly in form, from light novels to crowd-sourced Internet texts, as well as traditionally published works. When they become films, their drafting becomes unsettled again. The same goes with what could be termed his stunt-casting: while musical stars would seem to bring not only a fan following but a professionalism to the musical requirements of Iwai’s films, it’s not unusual for Iwai to cast these new actors against type, which is the first of several dramatic feints in Kyrie, his latest three-hour emotional epic.
Aina Iitani, who records as AiNA THE END, plays the film’s title character. But Kyrie never plays a pop song for the film’s entirety. Instead, she is met as a traumatized and houseless street musician who, we quickly learn, has the ailment of being barely able to utter a hoarse whisper, using pen and paper and uncertain gestures when met by a member of the public. When she does sing — at full volume — her vocal deliver is deliberately raw, and her metier is the direct emotional appeal of the indie songwriting format. All of these qualities would seem to fit the Iwai template, which prefers to deal in extremes and with outcasts, but Kyrie shows that the now middle-aged director’s feel for this kind of material, particularly in its reaches for topicality and its adherence to time-dislocating scene construction, is not at its most adept.
The key structural principle of Iwai’s films is, despite the youth of his subjects, their backwards gaze. It hardly matters that an early film like Fireworks doesn’t star a single character who has graduated high school; it’s suffused with a longing to go back before the first mistakes were made. In Kyrie, the first significant part of the movie plods forward with a televisual energy, as Kyrie meets up with ex-classmate Ikko (Suzo Hirose) and they pool their efforts as artist and manager to slowly build a public following. But Iwai’s real gambit is a block-construction progression, where we fall back, from 2023 to 2018 to 2011, and then deeper still into a fourth segment, placed at the precise moment of the 2011 Tohoku disaster. Iwai shuffles these segments, leaving a lot of gaps to be filled in, but further elaboration doesn’t serve his approach terribly well — the film is never more engaging than in the moments of disorientation when Kyrie becomes Luca (her childhood name), and Ikko becomes Maori (for the same reason) — or vice versa.
The problem with Kyrie might be that there is still a ton of narrative material to be spooled out. Iwai’s ability to sustain a scene is always compromised by his editing approach — which works beautifully like the limits of consciousness when dealing with fragmented material, but is oddly matched to the steady pace of Kyrie’s much more centered and journal-like parceling out of information. Characters speak in direct, clear sentences of intention too, which furthers the TV drama feel — there is never anything ambiguous about how Kyrie or Ikko feel, just in their temporal position when they say it, and Iwai doesn’t vary his tactics enough, except for the 15-minute Tohoku sequence that is the heart of the film.
In this respect, Iwai also becomes more familiar and unexceptional as a director. Recently, it can sometimes feel like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car has single-handedly flipped a switch for the kinds of Japanese dramas that appear at international festivals. Iwai has done a lot to intentionally unbalance the tone of this film, in that there are over a dozen songs, a mixture of scenes disgustingly brutal and shamelessly sweet, and, at times, a real attainment of the chaotic spontaneity it seems he always wants (but can’t muster consistently due to certain limitations in the film’s outdoor performance scenes). But the unearthed guilt that drives Kyrie and its attachment to a disability registers as clumsily overdetermined next to the precisely overdetermined Hamaguchi or the far more focused ripple effects of 2011 seen in Nobuhiro Suwa’s Voices in the Wind, a film that, at the very least, doesn’t treat the disaster’s tragic deaths as a moving, surprising reveal, but simply the texture of the work.
By invoking real-world events rather than the invented ones that usually serve as flashpoints in his fiction and films, Iwai risks making a film in which the machinations of drama are certain and require little to no interpretation — the necessary follow-through to any assemblage of a puzzle-like structure. The structural game the rest of Kyrie follows (which even involves one actor playing two characters) might be seen as an attempt to reinstall some mystery wherever possible. But the throughline is straight, and the passage, from grief to trauma and back to the painful yet resilience-filled present, is ultimately inevitable.
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