Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue (2017) User Reviews

Elegant and powerful but requires your patience

[wickedmikehampton · 7/10 · 15 December 2020]

I did double-billing pleasure with Director Yûya Ishii.

The first was the slowcore 'Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue'.

It's about 10 million people being invisible to each other, told through a young nurse who obsesses about death, and a construction worker with social skills deficit.

Although it could be classified as romance, there isn't a single kiss. It would probably be better to label it as a depression.

Its unhurried pace made the question of our existence more profound.

The movie is a metaphor for a world that's become faster than human relationships.

I'm glad that I was in the right, patient headspace to absorb it.

Then I watched 'The Great Passage' which I recommend too.

Tokyo State of Mind

[politic1983 · 7/10 · 9 February 2023]

If the English title is something of a mouthful, Yuya Ishii's most inventive film to date will leave you with a headful of undeveloped ideas. Using 'guerrilla' (that's me quoting myself) poet and visual artist Tahi Saihate's poetry anthology as inspiration, this is a whirlwind of ideas, visuals, noises, poetry and comment, all wrapped together under the Tokyo skyline.

Shinji (Sosuke Ikematsu) is a day labourer on a construction site in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics. Alongside fellow workers Tomoyuki (Ryuhei Matsuda), Iwashita (Tetsushi Tanaka) and Andres (Paul Magsign), they lift heavily by day and party heavily by night, living in cramped conditions, with limited funds and long-term prospects. Blind in one eye, Shinji's mind races at a hundred miles an hour, spouting out verbal diarrhoea that no one can keep up with.

Chance sees his path regularly cross with that of nurse and hostess Mika (Shizuka Ishibashi), though she is initially drawn to the more confident Tomoyuki. Hiding an illness, however, Tomoyuki suddenly dies at work, with Shinji the closest thing he had to family. Shinji sees this as his chance to get closer to Mika, their paths frequently crossing in Tokyo's busiest and noisiest districts until they build their own story together.

With a number of quirky coming-of-age comedies under his belt, there is a little more purpose and artistry in Ishii's approach here, though perhaps treads on some rather fine lines. With no major plotline to speak of, this has the carefree air in the face of a thousand problems that comes with youth. The characters bounce around the city, seemingly living twenty-four hour lives, with life a series of fleeting moments.

Based on an anthology, this is a collection of ideas, never fully developed or explored to show the melting pot that is Tokyo. Numerous social comments are thrown in as the city prepares for the Olympics, often portrayed as a negative for the city, even before COVID. Day labourers work on low wages and little job security; nurses have to moonlight in hostess bars. You can dream to the night sky, but the city will crush many dreams.

With moving cameras, this creates the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hustle and bustle of Tokyo streets where you are never too far from the noise. It also highlights the reliance on mobile communications, where constant noise and bombardment are reflected in Shinji's cluttered mind. Districts such as Shibuya and Shinjuku are where Shinji and Mika often find themselves, though neither seem to particularly like them.

Serving as a good companion piece to Ryuichi Hiroki's "Sayonara Kabukicho," this shows a changing face of Tokyo in the build up to the Olympics, where tidying up the city leaves a youth that is overworked and looking for an escape.

The fleeting nature of the city is reflected in the fleeting nature of the ideas contained within. Mika's visits home and the two leads' previous love interests are brought in, though don't necessarily add anything to the overall story, apart from suggesting they could have had alternative lives. Shinji's ramblings are little more than that, not necessarily offering conclusions. And Mika takes everything that happens to her in her stride, seemingly unaffected by it all.

"The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue" intrigues and leaves a lot to linger on the mind. Things come and go easily, but leave a lot of holes for you to fill in. It is earnest, yet naïve; full of ideas, but unable to fully articulate them. This will, therefore, frustrate or evoke depending on what you want from it. Throwing a lot of sounds and lights in your direction, and expecting you to take them in your stride, this is life in the city.

Politic1983.home.blog.

Japanese poetry derived love story.

[Mozjoukine · 25 November 2017]

This one is determined to be purest art movie. It is derived from a book of poems and centers on exploited one eyed construction worker Sôsuke Ikematsu, hired on the the 2020 Tokyo Olympics who pairs with Shizuka Ishibashi a nurse and part time girlie bar waitress who feels deserted after her mother's suicide. Her friends tell her to stop talking about death. The film totally lacks the forward momentum of a commercial movie, going through developments that have no baring on the outcome and creating a dozen moments where you expect to see an end title come up, unavailingly.

The background is quite vivid - the detailed construction site which is destroying the workers' bodies, the dormitories and bars where they drink to make their lives less miserable, the girls-only apartment block where Ishibashi is keeping a surprisingly high maintenance turtle in a temperature controlled tank with an air raid warning monitor. The pair wander through the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts of Tokyo encountering oddities like a flying airship, a lovable puppy that is captured, caged, put down and incinerated in cartoon animation and an ignored girl busker, who no one takes any notice of, singing about armpit sweat.

Director Yûya Ishii explained that his film is meant to show the things happening around people of which they take no notice. He has a following on the festival circuit. Bracket him with Hirokazu Koreeda.