It is a startling reality for some that our senses, and the CPU which controls them all, are not to be trusted, that what we experience and understand may in fact not be real. Memory, and the absence of it, plays the same trump card, discerning the subject from the objective and dislocating them from any sense of reality. Having no memory of events, and not being able to trust what you can piece together, presents many frightening scenarios of which arises the central question: do we really want to know the answer? Waking up slap bang in this hell is a nameless man in Murantin's meandering debut “My World”, a man whose past and future are all about to roll into one horrific loop.
My World is screening at Japan Filmfest Hamburg
Waking up dazed and disoriented, naked, in a park, a man (Yoshitaka Ishizuka) has no memory of who or where he is. Daily, he is inexplicably drawn toward a library in the town, seemingly searching for something or someone, followed by a nightly encounter with planet Earth high in the sky. His Sisyphean endeavour is interrupted when a schoolgirl (Yuka Funahashi) takes him under her wing, feeding him, clothing him, and playing Othello together. As another routine takes hold, he is locked in the basement whenever her boyfriend is over to avoid them being seen, much to the man's displeasure. Things take an even weirder turn when, back at the library, he keeps running into an older woman (Misato Akizawa) who disappears whenever he gets too close; consequently, the more he remembers the more his life begins to unravel.
A slow, dreamlike journey of self-discovery which, throughout the course of the brief 63-minute runtime, unfurls to reveal some nightmarish purgatory, “My World” is ironically succinct for a film that deliberately takes its time getting to its heart. It's glacial, ever-slowing pace allows the man's mystery to perplexingly unfold and seep into his everyday consciousness to the point we're left questioning if what is taking place is, in fact, real. This is the film's undoing: its gradual, tumbling descent towards its own conclusion is a baffling one, one which clumsily plays with metaphysics and Eastern philosophies, asking questions quicker than it can answer them; twisting an initially wholesome relationship between Ishizuka's and Funahashi's man and schoolgirl into something inevitably dark and poisonous spurs the movie deeper down this rabbit hole, throwing in an unhealthy dose of sex, violence (some of which is portrayed with bare-bones savagery), and a climax which feels overlong, stilted, and dragged out purely to extend the runtime.
All this said and done, “My World” isn't entirely terrible. It's an at-times playful venture through the humdrum daily routine of how ordinary folk keep themselves occupied (something which, during the lockdown, has been given ample attention), and the relationship-building between its two principle cast members is at the very least charming. The conscious decision to leave us in as much limbo as the man, though occasionally verges on tedium, pays off, amplifying our curiosity and does just enough to keep us invested – it feels as if our fate is entwined with his. No matter our level of interest though, it does nothing to soften the blow of how wretched folk can be and the lengths they go to maintain their own negligible ignorance.
“My World” is a film detached from the realm of lucidity. Harking back to the DIY aesthetics of V-Cinema's early days, Murantin's film is a raw picture, rough around the edges with choppy sound quality for good measure, courtesy of cinematographer Masaaki Yokoyama. It is a lofi approach working in tandem with Ishizuka's largely unfortunate delirium; from his nude awakening right through to his tumultuous undoing we get an eerily blurry snapshot of the cyclical nature of the man's frustratingly repetitive routine, also largely thanks to the deliberate editing style employed here. Ratcheting up this disconnect between what might be real and what indeed is not is Hisayuki Ishikura's portentous, perception-skewering score and sound design, always keeping in check the notion that his experience might in fact be further from reality than originally seemed. It also helps ease anyone into sticking with the film: for all its faults, the sonic disassociation keeps investment glued towards the end, even if at times it feels somewhat tacked on.
Answering the question of “what if “Memento” and “Tenet” had been filmed by any number of straight-to-video directors vying to get their releases played at the midnight cinemas” with more of a confused murmur than a definitive statement, My World's mark is left teetering in the same void Ishizuka's man finds himself. Far from being a sub-par affair, Murantin's film poses a number of questions requiring an open, patient mind; its tampering with spatial-temporal structures of reality, of religion, of consequence, does leave a lot to be desired and though it demands a lot of legwork from its audience, it at least provides an intriguing challenge as to which twist and turn it'll take, not unlike those choose-your-own-adventure stories. Though some may arrive at the same conclusion earlier than others – or even wilder ones – the fun lies in witnessing the connecting of the dots unfold before your very eyes.
