Your Name is the latest slice of animated goodness to truly take Japan by storm and boy, it is ever so lovely. It's the brainchild of Makoto Shinkai, of whose other work only 5 Centimeters Per Second am I familiar with. I have vague recollections of a visually gorgeous and fundamentally melancholy love story, rich with yearning and that brought some of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's work to mind. I suppose in many ways Your Name is similar.
We are presented with a high school girl, Mitsuha, who lives in the countryside and Taki, a boy from Tokyo. The two intermittently and spontaneously switch bodies, living as the other for several days of the week and gradually adjusting to what at first seems like a dream. Throughout the course of this body-switching the two fall for one another, though of course the situation presents difficulties which I'd rather avoid divulging for the sake of unnecessary spoilers. The body-switching stops as abruptly as it started and, as with dreams, the memories of the other begin to fade, starting with their name until only the vaguest recollection of a feeling remains.
What followed I found was rather reminiscent of the Murakami short story On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning - a sad story, don't you think? It also had me thinking about what we mean when we talk about love, or in particular how you can know that somebody is, to put it in the most disgustingly cliché way possible, The One? (I know, my skin is crawling too.) Why do the two fall for one another? By living as someone would you grow to love them? There is certainly an intimacy to it, it gives sharing a life a whole new meaning; how better to get to know someone than to genuinely experience what it is to be them? I think there is something very pure to it, but then neither of the two truly share any of their experiences together. They come to live their lives in parallel, though collaboratively, and perhaps that isn't so very different to being in a relationship. There is certainly a part of me that yearns for something like this and feels I can never truly understand the people that are important to me in my life. It's something that manifests itself in jarring moments of idiosyncrasy where a connection I perceived between myself and another is shaken, perhaps by some action or words, however trivial, that seem somehow totally at odds with how I thought things were. I would compare it to hearing some harsh, atonal note in the middle of an otherwise lush and gorgeous symphony.
So, I suppose, what is it like, Mitsuha and Taki, to feel so compellingly that the other is what you are searching for, or what was missing? Does it last - can it last? In 20 years time would they look at each other, resonate, in the same way? I have digressed tremendously and for that I apologise; it is a wonderful film and it obviously made me feel things in a pretty heavy way. I will always have time for art that makes you really feel and think about it.
No comments: