Naomi Kawase is the most lyrical of Japanese directors now working. As both a documentarian and a feature filmmaker, she discovers in the common materials of everyday existence — sun, wind, water, trees, insects, people — a beauty and transcendence that is always present, seldom noticed. Set mostly in her native Nara Prefecture, her films evince a quietly deep and intimate relationship with her physical, human and mythopoetic environment, while studiously ignoring the pachinko-parlor-in-the-rice-paddy side of Japanese rural life.
These qualities are present in her new romantic drama, "Hanezu no Tsuki (Hanezu)," which screened in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Shot by Kawase herself in and around Asuka, a village near Nara that was an ancient capital and cradle of Japanese civilization, the film is set in the borderland between unsullied nature and flawed humanity, the tragic past and the protagonists' messy present.
Story-wise, "Hanezu" resembles Kawase's 2001 film, "Hotaru (Firefly), a drama about the turbulent relationship between a sensitive, hunky potter and a troubled exotic dancer; but where the earlier film was volcanic, with sex and rage flowing in equal proportions, the new one feels as cryptic and under-motivated as a dream.