A Familiar Tune
Jpop phenom AiNA THE END toplines Shunji Iwai’s latest romantic waif melodrama. Lots of singing. Lots of waifing.
Kyrie
Director: Shunji Iwai • Writer: Shunji Iwai, based on his novel
Starring: AiNA THE END, Hokuto Matsumura, Haru Kuroki, Suzu Hirose, Nijiro Murakami
Japan • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong October 26 • IIA
Grade: C
In 2011, a young girl called Luca loses her family in Japan’s era-defining Tohoku natural disaster (Japanese films are still wrestling with the event) and thereafter loses her ability – perhaps desire – to speak, at least mostly. For a while it looks like she’s going to live with her older sister Kyrie’s boyfriend (according to him) or fiancé (according to her) Shiomi Natsuhiko (SixTONES and Johnny & Associates talent Hokuto Matsumura). But then child services gets involved and that never happens. They’re separated, but reconnect when Luca’s all grown up – and played by Jpop phenom AiNA THE END from BiSH in her first film – and forming a deep bond with her schoolmate Maori (Suzu Hirose, Last Letter). Years later again, Luca has remade herself as Kyrie in honour of her dead sibling, and is busking on the streets of Tokyo.
In director Shunji Iwai’s singular way, Kyrie | キリエのうた is a fantastical, whimsical ode to female friendship and – wait for it – the transcendent, healing power of music, loaded up with Iwai’s hallmark visual flourishes, the ones he uses when he’s not bathing his leading ladies in hazy soft focus. Though he made a splash with Love Letter in 1995, it was 2001’s All About Lily Chou-Chou that really made people sit up and take notice. Since then Iwai’s been content to wallow in the same saccharine sentimentality of his first film rather than the formal and narrative creativity he demonstrated in Chou-Chou. He reached a nadir in self-indulgent hokum with A Bride for Rip Van Winkle in 2016. Kyrie is better than that, but it’s likely going to ring loudest with AiNA THE END (government name Aina Iitani, kind of a discount UA) and Iwai fans. It’s better than Bride. Doesn’t mean it’s particularly strong.
Thank you Tokyo…
In the shifting timelines of Kyrie, nothing is that complex story, a story made more needlessly confusing by the fact that AiNA THE END plays both iterations of Kyrie; evidently the sisters are dead ringers for each other. Not only has Luca taken Kyrie’s name, Maori is now Ikko, a multi-wigged conwoman (!) who steps up to work as Kyrie’s manager after she see the nomadic Kyrie parked in a doorway. Ikko recognises her immediately, and takes the mostly homeless artist under her semi-pro wing. They shuffle around Tokyo with rollie suitcases (as all Iwai female seem to), meet with managers and A&R types, cobble together a backing band to support Kyrie’s whisky-and-cigarette vocals, and half-ass some social media promotion. Seriously, what self-respecting budding troubadour doesn’t exploit TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for tall they’re worth these days?
Full disclosure: I saw the two-hour international release version rather than the 178-minute cut that was released in Japan and is making the festival circuit. That a longer cut exists shows. There are large swaths of backstory that have clearly been excised in favour of running time, which leaves massive potential for OG Kyrie to seem less like a spineless woman-child. Swirling cameras and soaring ballads (which are hit and miss depending on your taste) stand in for realism and logic. What Iwai is trying to say is shrouded behind a jumbled chronology and frustrating casting choices. Kyrie ages from 2011 to 2023, but Maori and Shiomi do not. And Maori/Ikko’s fate, while hinted at early on, comes out of the blue and feels unjustified.
Kyrie lives or dies by its music, and if AiNA THE END’s brand of power ballad floats your boat you’ll be pleased – assuming you’re happy with the one, maybe two times Iwai lets her complete a song; she only really lets loose as a rock star once. A great deal of the film is about her process, whatever that is, and so we get a lot starts and stops. The problem with this fragmented tactic is that AiNA’s (can I say that?) not The Beatles yet. When Peter Jackson went to the well again and again to watch the process of Let it Be being made in Get Back, you didn’t have to like The Beatles (yawn), or even know them, to appreciate the process Jackson made crystal clear. This is not that. It’s also worth noting that Kyrie was based on Iwai’s own novel, and a lot could have been lost in the move from page to screen. When it’s musical, Kyrie is at its best, and much of that has to do with Iitani the pop star. It’s at its most insufferable when her waifish Tinkerbell schtick takes centre stage and her skills as an actor – or lack thereof – really show. The performance is overly mannered and grounded in a childlike sweetness that puts Shiomi in felony crosshairs. Fans are going to forgive her, but sister needs to hold on to her day job. — DEK