A delicate yet deeply felt portrait of that ephemeral time of life that is adolescence, the 60-minute featurette “Moonless Dawn” is a young work from young director/writer Harika Abe, and when I say young I certainly don't mean green or juvenile, but on he contrary I mean fresh, with a flourishing creative drive and the pulse of its target audience. Winner of Moosic Lab 2018's Actor Award “Moonless Dawn” is now streaming via the Japanese Film Festival Magazine.
“Moonless Dawn” follows three teenagers facing the sense of helplessness in dealing with pre-adulthood and the loss of reference points that it inevitably brings with it. Kou (Yuzu Aoki) is lost in a father/son relationship he simply cannot fix, where the father's alienation and despair constitute an unfair load on Kou's shoulder. Saki (Haruka Echigo) too has family turmoils; her parents are arguing all the time and the male figure's (father, stepfather?) explosions of violence towards Saki and her mother are the constant background of her days and nights. Shy and childlike, Saki reacts by nursing her introversion and distancing from the world, but she also expresses her emotional distress self-harming. Yuka (Yuuka Nakako) on the other hand, looks like a confident and popular girl, but her heart is craving for something she thinks she can find having sex with random people. Like an emotional prostitute she doesn't want money in exchange but emotions, in a desperate attempt to “feel” something.
Saki and Yuka are in the same high-school class. They don't hung out together and barely know each other, but they share the same absorbing escapism, a passion for musician LOWPOPLTD. One day though, his music is taken offline with great distress for Saki. Soon, Yuka decides to approach her and proposes to go searching for the austere building whose picture is on the LOWPOPLTD streaming site. Yuka thinks she saw it in Shibuya, near a love-hotel she knows well. On the rooftop of the building, they meet Kou who is indeed behind the LOWPOPLTD site, and the place soon becomes the three's refuge against everyday life bitterness. A bond is forming and some strength is maybe surfacing out of it.
The narration of “Moonless Dawn” is a mosaic of little episodes that feel real and close to the author, but it is mainly a mood piece where a combination of music, sense of place and remarkable acting creates an atmosphere of persistent melancholia as connective tissue between the otherwise floating events. Despite not being inspired by a manga (for what I know), it has the classic tropes and the esthetic of a Shōjo manga, but devoid of romance and charged instead with a certain dose of teenage-angst. They fluctuate between feeling vulnerable to the dangerous notion that life is meaningless and the solace of enjoying little beautiful things like fireworks.
The camerawork alternates realistic depiction of the character's life pains and existential boredom with some more dreamy and soft sequences of the newly built togetherness, and the secret place where the trio meets has a great part in creating this slightly surreal vibe. An amazing location, Shibuya's rooftop looks like a battleship drifting slowly, high up over the distant city. From there Kou, Saki and Yuka can watch their world from a distance and take a breath. It is on that rooftop that the movie offers its best moments, and the choice of questioning if it ever existed at the end, makes it all more poetic.
Lyrical, moody but also very palpable, “Moonless Dawn” is inspired and guided by the LOWPOPLTD's wistful beat and it is a promising start for its director/writer/editor Harika Abe and the whole young crew.
