Chihiro Ito has made a name for herself as a scriptwriter, with her collaborations with Isao Yukisada bringing us titles such as “Before the Vigil”,and “Crying Out Love in the Center of the World”. Recently, she has also taken up the directorial chair for herself, coming up with “Side by Side” and “In Her Room”, the latter of which we will be dealing with in the particular review. The film is based on a novel she wrote, and is produced by Isao Yukisada, while starring Satoru Iguchi, the keyboardist for J-pop sensation King Gnu, in his first starring role.
In Her Room is screening at New York Asian Film Festival
Susume is a dentist who has always had difficulty communicating with people. He works at a dental clinic, where he envies the other doctors who are socially adept while constantly worrying about what they think of him. One day, he meets a woman named Miyako and the two immediately start an affair, with him spending a lot of time in her apartment, which is filled with plants that grow all over the place, and bugs. Susume feels more and more connected to Miyako, but an accident that results in him having his leg run over and his meeting with Yoko during a stage about an anthropomorphic giraffe that ends up being eaten, who also seems to be connected with Susume, even before him, complicate things. As his irritation about Miyako's relationship with both grows, Susume approaches him and starts revealing a number of secrets, while the former stops contacting him..
Chihiro Ito delves as deeply as possible in the whole slow cinema concept, with the movie unfolding in a leisurely, hypnotic pace filled with mystery, eroticism and voyeurism, in an approach that could easily be described as dreamy. The presentation of this multileveled atmosphere is probably the movie's most impressive trait, with Ito using all cinematic aspects in her hands in order to implement it, including the editing, the cinematography, the set design and the acting, all of which are on a rather high level.
The cinematography in particular, results in a number of impressive images, with the jungle room being the most memorable one, and the various exterior ones that are also frequently dominated by intense flora, following up. Also of note is that Ito also uses the sudden zoom-ins Hong Sang-soo is famous for, on occasion, which are also quite impactful. The artfulness of the erotic scenes, with the impressive use of color and light and shadows, is also evident, as is the case with the voyeuristic ones.
Furthermore, Satoru Iguchi as Susume, Fumika Baba as Miyako and Yumi Kawai as Youko adopt and express the aforementioned atmosphere and the overall aesthetics of the movie in perfect resonance with them, all exhibiting a sense of enigma regarding their thoughts, actions and background that works quite well for the movie.
It is somewhere here, though, that the problems of the movie also appear. The acting, as much as the overall approach to the narrative is quite monotonous, with the lack of tension even in scenes that it would be easy to implement being accentuated by the lack of music, and resulting in a tempo that becomes tedious after a point. As time passes, the mystery exhibited by the acting becomes dull, with the protagonists looking like they are constantly stoned. The lingering on a number of scenes, despite their occasional beauty and artfulness, also becomes annoying considering the duration of the movie, with the same applying to the many questions that arise throughout but are never answered. Furthermore, the pretentiousness that dominates all aspects of the movie is not handled well at all, with the title eventually emerging as self-indulgent to the point of alienating the audience and undermining the film's intended message, which is actually about alienation and lack of communication.
In the end “In Her Room” emerges as a beautiful, very artsy movie that lacks, however, in both substance and execution.
