A Film a Week - Spring in Between / Hazama ni ikiru, haru

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The spectre of autism can prove to be a slippery slope for filmmakers. Even if it does not necessarily end up on the territory of exploitation, it tends to be the defining characteristic for the characters with it, as we testified with the films like Rain Man and Forest Gump. Having that in mind, making a compelling, convincing and believable romance movie with at least one character somewhere on the spectre seems like a difficult, if not downright impossible task, and the Japanese filmmaker Rika Katsu undertook it for her debut feature Spring in Between that we had the chance to see at Nippon Connection.

Katsu opens the film with a parallel montage of a man seemingly playing with blue paint on its hands, but actually painting and a woman running to some kind of an open show, against the backdrop of music consisting of gentle piano and melancholic strings. He is actually an accomplished, even celebrated painter Tohru Okunai (Hio Miyazawa), and she runs to meet him at his exhibition. As we find out in the next string of scenes, she, Haru (Sakurako Konishi) is a low-rank journalist often berated by her boss, and her newest task is to interview Tohru and write a piece on him and his art.

As she prepares for the task, she gets more and more into Tohru’s art and Tohru himself, his quirks, rituals and self-imposed structure, although they reveal his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, making him prone to obsessions and finding fascinating patterns in seemingly random things, acting on his impulses and apparent inability to empathize. For her, who finds some of those traits, although in a milder form, also in her own personality, it is not a game-changer. For her, it seems that Tohru is the only one able to really understand her, since her boss, colleagues and even her patronizing boyfriend (Yoshihiko Kosoda), also a journalist, but of a higher status in different type of paper definitely do not. But are those traits between the diagnosis and the relative functionality in the world really a promising beginning of a love story?

Working with her own script, Katsu manages to treat her characters with gentleness and even empathy, making their interest in each other seem genuine. The trouble is that, after a refreshing and promising start, she starts more and more relying on the romantic drama clichés in the terms of building up the events. However, the word play between the protagonist’s name (Haru means “spring” in Japanese) and her romantic interest’s obsession with natural phenomena, including cherry tree blossom in springtime add up to another meaning of the title, quite poetically so.

Directing-wise, her language is steady and clear, with the employment of usually controlled camerawork by Jun Fukumoto that tends to get a bit too fidgety in the scenes that try to signal some emotional uncertainty. Also, the way the director uses Toru Ishitsuka’s original score to mimic the emotions of the leading character and to trigger them within the viewers sometimes seems too obvious and therefore heavy-handed.

Hio Miyazawa, seen recently in Daishi Matsunaga’s Egoist (2022), continues to raise his profile with solid roles and good casting choices. But Sakurako Konishi, of Takashi Miike’s First Love (2019) fame, is really in command here, showing the complete control over her character. With the filmmaker’s noble intentions and the actors’ seamless effort, Spring in Between is definitely worth a watch, especially for festival-going, romance-loving crowds.