The first work from filmmaker, dancer and choreographer Nao Yoshigai, is a beautiful and fresh rappresentation of a magic twilight zone between physical body, feelings and a supernatural. “Hottamaru Days” earned Yoshigai the newcomer award at the Bunka-cho Japan Media Arts Festival in 2014 and initiated her to a filmmaking career.
“Hottamaru Days” is streaming as part of JFF+ Independent Cinema
In a traditional Japanese house, caressed by a summer breeze, a musician (real life popular musician Satoko Shibata) spends her solitary days composing music, exercising, and dozing off. Little she knows that four invisible fairies follow her everywhere, feeding on her body odor, and collecting her shed hair and dry skin particles. They roam the house searching for body detritus and cling on her while she is asleep to inhale her scent and pass it on to each other like a bubble of smoke. Like spirits of the house, they are joyous and curious, and they dance around in underwear and bare feet, like happy children.
One day, they encounter another bizarre entity in the house, a beautiful young woman (Lisa Oda) who lives underwater, in the bathtub. Soon they befriend her, but the water girl is different from them; she seems to be a newcomer fairy, discovering and exploring her supernatural status day by day. She is a little bit naughty and selfish, all she wants to do is to dance and celebrate the world outside the bathtub.
“Hottamaru Days” is an all-round sensorial experience. At the opening of the film, the director advises her audience to use headphones and set them on a higher-than-usual volume and dim the light around the screen. In fact, there are no dialogues in the film, only a well-designed ensemble of sounds and the occasional percussions, like in the climax scene of a night celebration. The four spirits of the house storm in and out, they literally wrap around the human, absorb her physical essence, making the choreography a truly effective bridge between the worlds of bodies and feelings. Funny and moody at times, the dance reaches some fairly imaginative peaks in certain scenes; when a fairy dances in the twilight at the sounds of the wind, and in the nocturnal magic procession around the house where a touch of voodoo provides fuel to the climax.
“Hottamaru” is a special word, created by director Yoshigai; it means “the things that accumulate by being left alone” and there is something deeply poeatic in giving some dignity back to humble detritus. One of the fairies finds a shaving of foot skin and admires its translucent philigrane. For dancers, that is a testimony of their hard physical work, an integral part of their artistic life.
To add a dynamic twist to the script, the third act is dominated by the water woman. Beautiful, green and unpredictable, she is an ode to a new beginning, and the closing discombobulated dance she executes in the nature outside the house, is a profane celebration of life. The photography contributes to the “Hottamaru Days” sensory tour with balanced shifts between light-bathed days, shaded interiors and dramatic, red-tinted night rituals.
To sum up, in “Hottamaru Days” director Yoshigai merges charmingly her cinematic vision with her choreography skills producing, as a result, a delightful film with a daring plot and a whimsical heart.
