“Melting Sounds” is the full-length directorial debut of Kahori Higashi. It was created in collaboration with MOOSIC LAB and stars Higashi collaborator Umeno Uno and the rising musician xiangyu.
“Melting Sounds” is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival
Koto (xiangyu) goes to her deceased grandmother's rural home to get away from the world for a bit. In the garden of the house, she finds an old man, Take (Keiichi Suzuki), who lives in a makeshift shack and records every sound he can think of on cassette tapes. After recording each tape, he buries it in a specific place in his hut, so the other world can listen to the living. The idyll life of the two new friends is endangered when Yamada (Amon Hirai) and Hiroko (Umeno Uno), who work at an unknown company, come and try to take Koto's grandma's house away.
“Melting Sounds” is a quirky little film that focuses more on atmosphere and feeling than plot, and that works pretty well. We watch Koto and Take, later joined by Yamada and Hiroko, recording different sounds, playing board games, or just hanging out. Most of the things they record on cassette tapes and bury, so Take's deceased sister can listen to and experience, are very ordinary, pedestrian even. We see them point their microphones to people speaking, children playing, Yamada making flips, even inanimate and silent things like potatoes.
This might sound dull on paper, but visually it is not. Instead, it is very pleasing, mostly because of the slow and purposeful movement of the camera and the characters within the frame. It is also pretty joy-inducing, life-affirming, and soul-crushing at the same time in seeing an old white haired guy wearing large Audio Technica headphones, trying to record the whirr of an air conditioner with a makeshift boom mic straight to a tape, so he can share it with his dead sister.
The pleasant atmosphere that makes up this movie comes as much as the laid-back editing and writing, as it does from the relaxed and easygoing performance by musician xiangyu. Though this is her acting debut, it doesn't show. She is just so unassuming, friendly, and open to experimentation and people, that she manages to break the barriers of possibly the most dry and pedantic character in recent history, Hiroko. And it happens so spontaneously and naturally, that it is just a joy to see. It even makes us want to be there with her, putting ketchup in our noodle sauce, eating cold noodles in winter, or simply hang out.
Xiangyu's performance is so engrossing, that we feel as if we watch her not playing the character Koto, but just being herself onscreen. And that makes some sense, considering a recent interview with director Kahori Higashi in which she says the idea for the movie came after she read an article by xiangyu about her grandfather. This gives even more depth to this already meditative movie.
Everything, no matter how trivial and mundane it might seem to us is special and deserves our utmost attention, because our lives are made up of precisely this type of everyday trivialities. That, at least, seems to be the point Kahori Higashi aims to make with her film about strange people recording the sound of flowers growing and old men playing chess, and she succeeds.
