I’ve never been sure what lemons are supposed to symbolise and the internet is no help. Are they meant to stand for bitterness or cleanliness? Sucking lemons is for jealousy, perhaps, because the face one makes on doing so is a grimace – but “go suck a lemon” means something rude. Some kind of spiritual website where the header is a picture of a woman with a bright, awkward smile tells me that the early Christians associated lemons with fidelity and the bitterness of disappointment, but when I trawl through Google again I’m unable to find any corroboration. Lemons were considered a luxury item in Roman times due to their healing properties and pleasant smell, yet the informal use of the word can also signify ‘an unsatisfactory or feeble person or thing’ and is used as slang for defective products. After discovering that her crush, Aomi, has hooked up with the ultra-basic Mizuki – “the embodiment of mass culture” – Amiko, the eponymous protagonist of Yoko Yamanaka’s Amiko, takes a large metal bowl of sliced lemons into the bath with her and bites away at them with the masochism of failed dreams.
It’s sad because Aomi seemed so promising. In the opening scenes of the movie we watch as Aomi (Hiroto Oshita) and Amiko (Aira Sunohara) meet for the first time by chance, in an empty classroom. He’s direct, reassuringly confident, and tells her to wait for him after soccer practice. When he returns and she’s listening to music on her phone, Aomi leans forward, puts one of her headphones in his ear, and immediately recognises the song as Radiohead’s ‘Lotus Flower’. For Amiko, he’s the epitome of counter-cultural teen cool and her crush on him defines both the narrative action of the film and her following year at high school. Yamanaka’s Amiko, screened this year at the 68th Berlinale, is a film about teenage obsession and ideological purity. The interesting thing about Amiko’s crush on Aomi is that it requires almost nothing to survive. Following their initial meeting, she doesn’t talk to him again for almost another year, and then it’s only to tell him how much he’s disappointed her. She’s sustained by her image of him, and the snippets of information that she gleans from classroom gossip or her disinterested best friend, Kanako, are absorbed into this fantasy. Amiko’s obsession is an act of self-projection and Aomi becomes a mirror for her dreams and values, an exercise in idealisation – the real Aomi almost doesn’t figure.
The depiction of teenage girls in Amiko is sensitive and convincing. There’s a particularly great scene that takes place midway through the summer, six months after Amiko’s initial meeting with Aomi, where a group of highschool girls play with tarot cards in the space between lessons. The game itself is a mask for the subtle renegotiation of power and the exposition of group secrets: despite her appeal to supernatural authority, the pointed questions of the card reader soon provoke a physical fight. Through moments like these, Yamanaka perfectly evokes the subtle cruelties of high school and the way in which teenage hierarchies function. When Mizuki, now studying at university, returns to their school for a visit, Amiko asks with feigned indifference – “Isn’t Mizuki the one with the fair skin that played basketball?” In the gap between her question and Kanako’s reply, her interior voice admits: “To be honest, I remember her perfectly”. They stalk Mizuki on social media and laugh at her because she posts pictures of food, but they also can’t resist sneaking a look at her as she laughs with the other girls in the hallway. Amiko is a counter to typical representations of teenage girls – in both the lemon-eating sequence and another scene in which she eats gruesomely orange pasta with tomato sauce she’s presented in an almost anti-erotic light. Her behaviour is deliberately weird and her clothes are the opposite of Mizuki’s light cuteness: when she travels to Tokyo with the intention of hunting down the new couple, she’s swaddled in an oversized camel coat that – when combined with her heavy fringe – drowns out any suggestion of her physical form. Amiko is a true outsider – Aomi, as we will learn, was only faking.
Amiko’s influences are clear. The restless energy of Yamanaka and Asuka Kato’s shooting style (dramatic zooms; jaunty sound; heavy stylisation) situates Amiko in the rebellious tradition of the Japanese avant-garde, recalling work by filmmakers like Shuji Terayama, while the feel of the film evokes the do-it-yourself ethos of the jishu eiga era. A scene in which Amiko commands a young couple to dance with her in the metro is both charming and socially cutting. After the trio finish dancing, Amiko turns to the other two and tells them that it’s ‘impossible’ for the Japanese to dance spontaneously in what is perhaps both a reference to the false spontaneity of the Instagram generation and a meta-reference to the artfully constructed nature of their dance – they’re in a film and so of course there’s nothing spontaneous about it. With her disdain for bourgeois culture, lightness of character and extreme fringe, Amiko is the spiritual inheritor of Louis Malle’s Zazie. She pursues her beliefs with conviction and heads to Tokyo with the intention of confronting Aomi for his choices. After breaking into the apartment that he shares with Mizuki she climbs into his bed and interrogates him, asking “That conversation we had, wasn’t it from the heart?” He disappoints her, again, but Amiko is not destined to stay down. Although raw and a little clumsy at times, Amiko is an extremely self-assured and engaging debut – and it’s also worth noting that at only twenty, Yoko Yamanaka was one of the youngest directors at the Berlinale this year.
Missouri Williams is a writer living in the Czech Republic. She is Assistant Editor of Another Gaze. Her instagram can be found at @missouriwilliams
