Okaeri (1995)

A schoolteacher’s wife, who types transcriptions at home for a publishing company, begins to spend long hours staring out the window rather than finishing her work. Then Yuriko begins to take long walks around the neighborhood. For a while, it appears that Okaeri will be a movie about a housewife’s lack of stimulationi, not unlike She and He. However, it gradually becomes clear that something else is at work here, as she begins to talk to her husband about her “patrols” in which she looks for signs of or sometimes receives signals from “the organization.” THEY are taking over, turning everything real into something fake, and she must continue her patrols to make sure they don’t succeed, or perhaps merely to monitor what is happening.

When she is home with her husband Sakuma, things appear to be normal. They talk about this and that, she is disappointed that he doesn’t come home when he promised to eat a meal she cooked, and so on. But she suddenly will break off what she is doing and leave without explanation. She doesn’t do anything dangerous, doesn’t leave in the middle of cooking, for example, nor wander around in her nightclothes or naked, and the house is always neat and clean. When he at last goes to a public phone to call a psychiatrist she walks past the booth and as he chases her she steals a car left idling. Still he resists taking her to the hospital, and we realize that we are not in a study of psychotic behavior but rather a love story.

After a visit to the hospital – just to talk to a doctor – he spends the whole night watching her sleep, but since she wants to go home, he takes her, himself collapsing in exhaustion at the door of the apartment. The Japanese title is from the standard phrase okaeri nasai, used in response to tadaime, said whenever someone returns home. But while Yuriko is home with her husband, she has not been cured. She watches him sleep, but once he is safely awake, she goes out again. He finds her fallen asleep in a field but hugs her as they face the dawn, together.

All of this is presented matter-of-factly, with ambient sound, natural lighting, and completely without a music score to tell us how we are supposed to feel about it all. The writer/director Makoto Shinozaki had been a college student of the film theorist Shigehiko Hasumi, whose other students included Aoyama, Suo, and Kiyushi Kurosawa. Shinozaki himself became an influential critic and interviewer, while producing an occasional utterly independent film like this one, which ultimately led him to a Professorship related to psychology at the university where he had begun. For a while, the movie looks like a very bad early Varda film, perhaps resulting from his years as a projectionist at the French Cultural Center in Tokyo, but once we see the paranoia and the love both come to the fore, it becomes much more interesting. Despite the feeling of French ennui, it is thoroughly Japanese in its presentation, with long takes, low angles, and an unwillingness to put the most important feelings into words.