I missed it when it first came out and when it was screened at the university film club where I spent a few years, but Kairo eventually became part of my life and one of those few films that obsess me, that I re-watch year after year, decade after decade, as much for their cinematic qualities as for very personal and intimate reasons, which have less to do with the script or what the film is officially about, than with secondary things and details in the settings, because it took me a good half-dozen viewings of the film I'm talking about today, and at least two during the confinement at the beginning of 2020, in a state of solitude and psychic vulnerability far greater than normal, for certain things to finally jump out at me and for me to understand why they've been haunting me for so long.
Kairo's characters are students or young adults, and watching them evolve in their lives reminds me of my own youth and studies. College and all the concentration and solitary work it demands, not to mention the stress linked to precariousness and uncertainty about the future; new encounters, whether significant or not, or which sometimes only become significant long afterwards; geographical, social and cultural uprooting, and resettlement in a new city to explore and tame, immense and indifferent, as Nancy once was for me. Being part, little by little, over time, of a small group. Of something both warm and comforting, and not very solid.
Taguchi's apartment. Small desk, metal lamp, plastic laundry tub. Fridge, garbage can, TV. Little decoration, nothing really warm or reassuring. My own studio was also minimalist. I lived a minimalist, solitary, monastic life, marked, purely by youth, by the discomfort, the anguish of being left alone in this reduced space, in the midst of so few possessions; less a home than a cell or cage in reality, where time passed with inconceivable slowness, where the noises of the street and even the music I listened to pretty much all the time weren't enough to cover the sort of complete silence that seemed to envelop the existence I led.
(I still dream about that studio, twenty years later. It's the same dream every time. I'm alone in my studio, the light is cold, dull, it's impossible to tell whether it's day or night. I'm incredibly bored and there's nothing to do, no one to talk to, nowhere to go. Time doesn't pass. It's as if I've been condemned to spend eternity alone in these 20 square meters).
In the scene where one of Taguchi's colleagues enters his home after his suicide to investigate, we hear strange music, made up of sound effects mixed with a high-pitched, sinister, slightly dissonant female voice. This reminded me of another recurring thing in my dreams, the last occurrence of which (which also corresponds to the very last dream I wrote down before abandoning this habit) also coincides with the theme of lost youth, in every sense of the word:
"I'm alone in a building corridor, open on one side to a vast inner courtyard, which opens onto other corridors, other open apartments, terraces and so on. I'm looking in particular at a tiny apartment on the top floor, separated from the sky only by a plastic sheet. I wonder what the person who lives there does when it rains, or in winter. Maybe it's the apartment of a girl I once knew, or mine when I was young, or both. This setting takes me back to my youth, to the notion of loneliness, discomfort, poverty, vulnerability that I associate with youth, with the first experience of life alone, which I usually try to forget, and I mentally hear strange music, a mixture of parasitic noises and a distorted, dissonant singer's voice, which I identify as music I would have either listened to, or composed, in the past; and this music distresses me, it's oppressive and unhealthy."
The plastic curtain, semi-transparent like a tarpaulin in the studio, is a thin, fragile membrane separating dream from reality, life from death, past from present, and so on. We pull it aside with Michi, and enter with her, imperceptibly, into the other world, where Taguchi's ghost may appear.
*
When Michi and her colleagues are chatting on the terrace at the top of the skyscraper where the greenhouse is located, we hear a constant white noise in the background. We don't really know whether it's the rumor of the street and cars on the ground, or whether it's the electronic, parasitic murmur, discreetly invading reality, which symbolizes the ghosts in Takefumi Haketa's soundtrack.
*
The greenhouse. Living close to plants. It's not really nature – we live in a world of concrete and electronics above all – but, all the same, a last contact with it. It's something fragile that we can help to keep alive – unlike people, who disappear little by little, with nothing we can do for them. And it's a civilized nature, the outline of a garden, or the memory of a garden (paradise = Pardes, garden), unlike the wild vegetation that grows everywhere around buildings or abandoned factories, teeming with life but for us a symbol of death.
*
Everywhere in the film: floppy disks, CRT screens and cabling. All this equipment, now obsolete, gone from the landscape, linked to so many intimate memories, most of which have also been lost. I spent hundreds of hours, at IUT and then at university, in computer rooms, discovering the web, typing documents, formatting, reworking images... Filling floppy disks with my creations and discoveries. Some of them turned out to be faulty. I loved the hum of the readers, just as I loved the hum of the CPC when I was a child. I also loved the music of the 56k modem. Today's computers are silent, abstract, and we dream of ethereal machines, as with this fantasy of the "cloud".
The Internet then was still new and vaguely disquieting – disquieting not as the surveillance device it has become, but as a web, a network of miniature worlds, strange, sometimes funny, often sordid or excessively bizarre, sexually or intellectually provocative. It was the era of the "personal page", and the web was a collection of inner worlds; websites were really the inner worlds of their creators, in an objectified, visitable form. Surfing from site to site was like being able to visit the dreams of strangers, endlessly.
*
Michi's apartment. Pale yellow walls. Translucent, old-fashioned curtains. Curtains like these always remind me of my childhood, of my maternal grandmother's dining room. Thin membranes, too, separating the "objective" world outside from the intimate, secret world that is each home.
Kettle, coffee maker, TV, bed, green plant, coffee table. Comfort, cleanliness, abundance. But the feeling of solitude, of silence, of time not passing, is there once again.
Television as the only link with society and collective life. Watching the news to participate in society. How many times have I done this, when objectively speaking, I was completely indifferent to the news. Having a background noise; otherwise, who knows what might start talking in the silence.
In both Michi and Kawashima, the windows open onto total darkness. The characters' solitude, once again, is cosmic, as absolute as if they were drifting alone through space. Or as if they had already disappeared from the real world, from the world of the living, and their apartment was a last shell, a last protection against nothingness, soon to be dissolved too.
*
Kawashima's character, connecting to the Internet for the first time, finds himself inexplicably confronted with webcam-like images of young people his own age, home alone at night (supposedly) and wandering about as if haggard, dazed with loneliness and idleness. Looking at the scene, I can't figure out if they're dead or not. What does it matter? They're not living people.
All this again takes me back to memories – real or dream. Feeling caged. Bored to an inexpressible degree, as if the world, life itself, had been emptied of all possibility, and time frozen in a grayish "no day nor night".
Feeling vulnerable, threatened, for reasons that are opaque and unknowable.
Twenty years on, I'm still dreaming of that studio and the solitude it's synonymous with. I keep coming back, at night, to live there again, to settle back in, and everything is still there – the furniture, the TV, the food – ready to welcome me for an eternity of morose daze and objectless anguish – or rather the anguish of something invisible and unspeakable – as if everything that had happened to me since I left had only been a parenthesis.
Continuation of the dream story I quoted above:
"This music disturbs me, it's oppressive and unhealthy, and it takes me back to one last memory. The memory of moments of terror, at the end of my adolescence and at the beginning of my studies, when in a half-sleep I felt an evil presence around me, in my room, in my studio, an evil presence that I forgot and wanted to forget most of the time, but whose consciousness came back to me in the doze or when I woke up, and it was then all the rest of my life that was just a dream."
*
"Uranus setup"
Ouranos: the sky. But in Kairo, the dead don't go to Heaven, and they don't come back either. There is no Heaven, only limbo, oblivion and boredom.
*
When Kawashima cuts the connection and even the computer, horrified, and lights himself a cigarette, I feel an almost personal relief. And I envy him. Rejecting the network as what we guess is poison for the soul and returning to the real – even if it's a cigarette sitting in a dorm room, alone, in silence, the absence of any connection or perspective.
Computer rooms. Memories of the university. Solitude among others. Everyone is alone. Brightly-lit or darkly-lit rooms, where you could plunge into your dreams in the warmth of others, without any direct human contact.
Desktop computers, CRT screens, neon lights, photocopiers. Fire doors. Few windows: simple strips of opaque wired glass at the top of the walls. No contact with the outside world, with nature.
*
Screens in every scene. Our lives no longer take place in this world; they take place on the web, social networks and instant messaging software. Twenty years ago (the age of this film, roughly speaking; but Japan was ahead of us), the real world was the material world, and we fled trouble, missteps and enemies into the virtual. Then, little by little, the virtual became the real world.
The Internet is the only real world I live in. And it's a dangerous world. Mistakes are easier to make and have heavier consequences. The ground can open up beneath your feet at any moment. So it's the material world that has become a refuge. The world where you can't be traced at all times, where every word you say, every thought you have, every gesture you make, every image you see, every page you read, can't be automatically detected by the powers that be or by an enemy, nor preserved forever. The material world, where we're not permanently connected to others, and where we're not drowning in a stream of thoughts, words, opinions, conflicts and issues that overwhelm and pollute us.
The shadows on the walls, beyond the symbolism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: others can only be discerned through the traces they leave behind. Direct communication is impossible. But these traces arouse little interest in anyone (even when their supernatural significance is restored). People enter and leave our lives without our paying any particular attention. Even those we meet IRL. They reappear from time to time on the surface of our minds, like half-thoughts, like vague forms on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, which we quickly dismiss.
*
The forbidden room where the encounter with the female ghost takes place reminds me of the cellar of the apartment building where I lived as a child. These few corridors of bare concrete both worried and fascinated me, as did the building's boiler, half visible through an opening in the wall, with its constant, inhuman, dull roar.
*
The rain, the technical room where the characters work; peeling, faded paint, grayish tones. For me, urban life, work and society are linked to rain, autumn and decay.
*
When Kawashima is at the university library, the image is cottony, the focus strange, everything seems fake, like a model. The shadows are very stretched. What time is it? Does the question make sense? Are we already out of time, in an eternity of boredom and emptiness?
*
Overall, the film's image is a little "fuzzy". The sky is shrouded in a pale, strange glow. Right from the start, we are in the midst of a gradual erasure, not only of humans but of the world itself.
Everywhere, small woods, flowerbeds and hedges, surrounding residences – themselves pale and beginning to be blackened by time and humidity. After a few days (?) into the film, the setting looks as if it has been abandoned for years. Accelerating entropy?
In Harué's building, the walls are bare concrete, the doors are gray, everything is gray. It's always been a post-apocalyptic setting. The world has always been ugly, cold, sad, in ruins and populated by ghosts. We've got used to it. It takes an actual apocalypse to make it obvious.
Apocalypse, etymologically, means "unveiling".
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