A Film a Week - Incinerator / Shokyakuro

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Growing up is not easy, but we often get misconceptions about it from various media like movies and books. One of the most common is the idea of “the summer that will change anything”, and it often stands at the centre of coming-of-age movies. The thing that Shuntaro Uchida does with his film “Incinerator” is subverting that cliché. The film premiered at Karlovy Vary’s competition section Proxima, and recently played at San Sebastian.

Written by Uchida and Koichi Kubodera and adapted from the novella written by Kaori Ekuni, it tells the story of a girl named Kozue (played by the newcomer Karin) and her slow and steady journey into the adulthood over the course of a summer just before her tenth birthday. At school, she is not among the popular bunch, tends to spend a lot of time in the infirmary, and has a peculiar habit of throwing objects that she associates with bad memories into the school’s backyard incinerator.

At home, however, she feels that she is neglected, as her divorced musician and borderline alcoholic father Kenji (Takuma Nagao) is usually absent and, even when he is present, he is not the most reliable person in the world. Her mother Yoko (Akiko Kikichi, mostly active on television) is busy with supporting her child financially by working at a warehouse of a book store, and dealing with the turmoils of her coworkers to provide emotional support to her daughter.

Things might change when Kozue meets a university student named Jinta (Taiki Shinozuka) who comes to her school to present and perform shadowplay. She develops a crush on him, while he treats her like his little sister of sorts, but she becomes more comfortable expressing herself.

One might expect some development on the front of Kozue’s journey to maturity and overcoming her problems, but this is not the path the film will take. Instead, it sometimes looks as an everlasting exposition to another movie, maybe its own sequel, as the director prefers to spend time with Yoko dealing with the responsible and Kenji with the irresponsible adult stuff, or with Kozue seemingly comfortably playing the passive role in her own life. A certain lazy feeling can be also read from the cinematography by Shin Yonekura that feels quite pastoral, albeit the film is set in a city, the sound design that amplifies the same feeling with the constant cricketing in the background.

It is left to the actors to largely develop their characters. Akiko Kikuchi manages to insert some humaneness into the stereotype of a busy, working single mother that Yoko could have been, while Takuma Nagao tends to overplay the drunk card, but still keeps Kenji within the spectrum of “not that awful” guys. Taiki Shinozuka is compelling as a young man that somehow has to deal with the emotions of a young girl, but does not know how. The young actress Karin is pretty much tasked to carry the emotional weight of the movie often in close-up shots in which she stares into things trying to figure out the wide world around her, and she does it with a certain maturity that could rather be related to her own age than to her character’s (she looks at least two years older than the character of Kozue).

However, the key thing here, and the key for deciphering the whole film, is the editing by Takaki Yokohama. That could sound counter-intuitive for a film whose slow pacing makes it a harder watch than usual, but that is quite a deliberate decision. That way, “Incinerator” subverts the clichés of coming-of-age movies, portraying growing up as a process that is not always clear, that feels messy, sometimes boring and almost always frustrating. It might not be pretty, especially for the kids left to fend for themselves emotionally, but it is still true.