Winner of the Runner-up prize at Pia Film Festival last year, “Goodbye!” is a rather personal documentary about a budding filmmaker, (Fuka Nakatsuka herself) leaving her home for a new life in Tokyo, and a trip through both her past and the two cities featured in the movie.
As such, and since Nakatsuka is about to leave the house she lives in Shiga with her divorced mother, she starts visiting the rest of her family, after giving a bit of background info for each of them. First is her older sister, a former delinquent who, in the course of the movie, also reveals that she is pregnant. During her visit, though, she learns that her father has recently purchased a new house, and decides to pay him a visit. Starting with asking some money in order to move to Tokyo, eventually she also asks some rather difficult questions about their divorce, with him admitting that it was his fault, in one of the most impactful moments in the movie.
Then she meets her brother, who seems like a rather cool individual, although in the spiteful way only a sister can have for her brother, Nakatsuka informs us that he is not that great, particularly due to the way he treated his ex-girlfriend. Through these interactions, it is revealed that the members of the family are not communicating among them, although not for any particular reason, as they just seemed to have gradually drifted apart.
The second part of the documentary has Nakatsuka living in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, after a job offering comes her way. While acting as much as a tourist as possible, checking the popular sites and asking random people either to record her or she to record them, she also shares a lot about herself, mostly when the camera is pointing elsewhere, eventually revealing that the film is also an effort to overcome her introverted nature.
Mostly consisting of intense close-ups, shaky camera, and abrupt cuts to anything Nakatsuka finds interesting, particularly in Tokyo, this raw approach, that frequently looks like a home video, also induces the narrative with a tension that works quite well for the narrative. Her purpose, of revealing herself to the audience in order to overcome the aforementioned issues, seems to have been achieved, with the camera work essentially mirroring her psychological state each time, and her overall demeanor.
In that fashion, and although the documentary is rather personal, it still manages to emit a certain level of empathy for the protagonist, while the ending closes the whole thing in the most delightful and optimistic fashion.
As such, “Goodbye!” manages to rise much above its technical limitations, due to the evident low budget, highlighting that Nakatsuka has what it takes to eventually shoot a great feature documentary, in the style of Wang Bing or Huang Hui-chen's excellent “Small Talk”.
