In her second feature, following the 2018 title “Orphan's Blues”, Riho Kudo deals with the topics of friendship and mischief, love and affection in a strictly coded society such as Japanese. “Let Me Hear It Barefoot” premiered last September at the home turf of Pia Film Festival, and it was selected for the Harbour section of IFFR, which serves as its international premiere.
It seems that our protagonist, a young guy named Naomi (up and coming actor Shion Sasaki), has trouble connecting to people around him. When he is surrounded by his friends, he tends to zone out, and he has a very formal relationship with his father (Masahiro Komoto). So, when Naomi meets his exact opposite, Maki (newcomer Shuri Suwa) by chance at a swimming pool, his life turns completely…
Maki is a happy-go-lucky-type of young lad who lives with an elderly blind woman Midori (veteran actress Jun Fabuki) and the only thing he shares with Naomi is the love for vintage technology such as audio- and video-tapes and recorders. When Midori gets seriously ill and ends up in hospital, he leaves her savings to Maki with a task for him to travel the world and report to her so she could enjoy it by proxy. However, he decides to stay in Japan and fake the audio-letters, and Naomi joins him in his “venture”, and the two youngsters start spending a lot of time together, often engaging in quite a physical, sometimes even violent homoerotic horseplay, while the question how to express the feelings of queer attraction keeps looming over their heads…
Riho Kudo is quite discreet in her approach, since she avoids spelling things out. She respects her viewers enough to let them figure the context out themselves. It is clear that the both boys suffer from repression conducted by society, not just regarding their sexuality, and they struggle to find a way to express themselves and their emotions. Some “background” things remain wrapped in secrecy, like the cause for such a cold and distant relationship between Naomi and his father, the nature of Midori's and Maki's relationship and even Midori's motivation to finance one's trip around the world, which might have something to do with her past.
Probably the strongest points of the film are its sense of humour taken from the boys' ingenious approach to sound engineering, and the use of audio-visual components like the sound design, Soma Fujii's gentle musical score and Yasuyuki Sasaki's cinematography for the dramaturgical purposes and depicting the inner lives of the two leading characters, especially Naomi, in an intuitive way. The mix between the young and the more experienced actors also serves quite well.
On the other hand, there is a considerable problem in the editing department, since the editor Azusa Yamazaki fails to establish the rhythm in the endless repetition of the boys' routine around the middle of the film. Surely, the source of the problem is mainly in the script and the directorial approach that somewhat fails to deepen its thesis, and there is just so much an editor can do about it, but the runtime of over two hours is going to be felt in a not so pleasant way.
The very ending of the film is quite poignant and it mends the whole thing a bit, but one has to wait for it. In the end, “Let Me Hear It Barefoot” might seem a bit like its protagonist: too shy and gentle for its own good.
