Naomi Kawase’s Vision takes place in a rural zone of the Nara Prefecture. This is the region in Japan where Kawase grew up and later developed the Nara International Film Festival. In this setting, Kawase’s home, she presents familiar themes: an intimate treatment of the forest as a repository for memory and emotion (The Mourning Forest, 2007) and the philosophical exploration of processes of seeing (Radiance, 2017). Also recognisable in Kawase’s filmmaking, including Vision, are notions of intergenerational friendship (An/Sweet Bean, 2015), as well as parental abandonment and being raised by one’s grandparents¹ (Katatsumori, 1994; Chiri, 2012) the latter of which both demonstrate her interest in playing with autobiographical forces or personal experience, in both documentary and fictional filmmaking. In nodding to familiarities cemented over the course of her oeuvre, Kawase is able to execute new conceptual leaps with Vision.
In Vision, we first meet Jeanne (Juliette Binoche), a well known French essayist, on a train sitting opposite her young female translator and assistant (Sils Maria fans should not get too excited: Vision is pretty hetero). When Jeanne arrives in Nara, however, it quickly becomes clear that her motivations extend beyond writerly interest. Specifically, Jeanne is determined to find a mythical herb known as ‘vision’, one that is rumoured to alleviate human pain when it scatters its spores every 997 years. Jeanne’s quest for ‘vision’ indicates she holds and is desperate to relieve her own “human pain”. In Nara, Jeanne meets and finds lodging with Tomo (Masatoshi Nagase), an arborist who, with his dog Koh, has made the forest and mountain (one in Nara’s Yoshino range) his home, having moved from a city during early adulthood because he was “tired”. Alongside his exhaustion, Tomo harbours a dull pain or sense of ennui that Jeanne relates to and which results in an erotic pull between the two characters. Mostly, their mutual attraction seems to be rooted in a genuine sensual chemistry, one that Nagase and Binoche perform convincingly and, while it is complicated by Jeanne’s search for ‘vision’, does not fall secondary to it.
When Jeanne asks Tomo what he does in Nara, he says that he is there to “save the mountain”. Saving the mountain and its forests is a project borne from the intimacy of dwelling in it, allowing Tomo to understand that “mountains are alive”. Kawase follows this sentience with her camera through lingering shooting practices that establish the forest as a vital space for humans and nonhumans. Both Tomo and his friend Aki (Mari Natsuki) an elderly herb collector who is blind, know the forest through their bodies, the vehicles through which they are able to sense that it is becoming “unsettled” due to climate change. This unpredictability has made their home slightly strange: the trees bend and wind blows differently.
Kawase spends the first quarter of the film with setting, establishing the forest and mountain as familiar. But as soon as Tomo mentions the forest becoming “unsettled”, Kawase turns the forest on her characters (and spectators), delving into territories the ethereal and strange. Both narrative and cinematography imbue the mountain forest with magic: beneath its rustling canopy beloved characters begin to disappear without explanation, most notably Aki as she wanders into the forest on foot. A giant wind sweeps her body into a violent dance that ends in collapse. Picking up a yellow leaf and holding it up to the sky, Aki suddenly sees before curling up into a ball, the camera receding above her body into space. Has she found ‘vision’? Is she dead? This is never made clear. When Jeanne leaves on a sojourn to France, Tomo finds an injured young man named Rin (Takanori Iwata) during his morning walk in the mountain. Rin moves in with Tomo but barely speaks, let alone offer an explanation for the way he was found. When Jeanne returns, she is deeply shocked by Rin’s presence, dropping all of her luggage when she sees him.
Binoche and Kawase work together to allow the audience to intuit that Jeanne and Rin have met before, without giving the source of this connection away. Indeed, Jeanne’s character is a masterful collaboration between actor and director. Kawase was drawn to work with Binoche from their first meeting, and Binoche was equally drawn to Kawase’s filmmaking, interested in the “inner search” shared by many of her characters.² Jeanne is a unique figure in Kawase’s oeuvre and beyond, with access to her interiority held back almost entirely by director and performer. Jeanne’s “inner search” manifests itself outwardly in her desperate search for vision (the herb) but we do not know why, for instance, she spontaneously starts weeping or gazes upon Rin with such dazed shock. In other films this kind of withholding is profoundly distancing but Kawase’s conviction in executing this narrative, combined with Binoche’s communicative facial expressivity maintain a hold on their audience, convincing them to remain in cinematic disorientation for a little bit longer.
While I felt initial hesitation about the dynamics or gazes potentially produced by Binoche’s presence in Vision, Kawase has argued that Jeanne’s position as “a foreigner actually doesn’t affect the story so much. Nara is my place. I live here and it’s where I weave my stories.”³ The specificity of Jeanne’s narrative and Kawase’s authorial command from behind the camera dispelled my worries which allowed me to consider other ideas that the film attends to.
In Kawase’s audiovisual poetising of the Nara forests in Vision, she imparts an experiential privilege to her audiences. Those who are interested in cinema and the senses will find Vision exposes a haptic tapestry. In many ways, its intersection of cultures, use of multiple languages (Japanese, French, English) and concentration on memory appeal to Laura U. Marks’s definition of ‘intercultural cinema’ which she identifies as a zone uniquely generative in activating a spectator’s sensorium.⁴ At one point Jeanne muses that she imagines vision will be “be soft”. Of course, she is referring to the mythic herb that captivates her, but when this line is delivered it sits strangely: as if in describing sight as a feeling sense, Jeanne is rendering the ocular tangible. This description encapsulates the spectatorial experience of Vision, where Kawase treats ecological phenomena with such intense visual consideration that one feels they are able to touch trees, dew, grass, leaves. My senses were so overwhelmed that after the film finished I impulsively felt the textured bark of an old oak nearby the cinema.
Vision, of course, is a compelling title: one that links the sight or ‘eye’ of Kawase’s camera with the diegetic world of the film in which vision is a plant. This is a curious doubling between camera and plant that extends throughout the film, so much so that Kawase’s camera takes on a vegetal form, nestling itself in its forest surrounding. Much like Jeanne’s experience of time as uncertain temporal blurring, the camera’s presence slips away and – through translucent, impressionistic cinematography – audiences can almost enter the space that Kawase has recorded.
Yet while spectators are permitted to become overwhelmed by and attached to Vision’s magical forest setting as a container of myth and tradition, Kawase combats Western audiences’ impulse to orientalise rural Nara. Kawase locates her setting within networks of globalisation and transport: power lines, trains, buses, cars, commodities. These visual cues counter a treatment of the forest as an unreal fantasy space that would give viewers license to sidestep the urgency of Vision’s ecological call to action: to interact with the world around us with more embodied consideration, respect, and wonder. That we allow nature to move us, and subsequently move ourselves to nurture its power. Despite Kawase’s camera becoming plant, she only grants her onscreen characters – Jeanne, Tomo, and Rin – the spectacle of finding ‘vision’ (the herb). While we are exposed to a surreal final sequence in which the forest erupts into flame and then clears, Kawase cuts our experience of ‘vision’ short, dissolving the screen to black. The last moment of the film is pure audio: “Isn’t it beautiful?” Jeanne’s voice exclaims. Faced with this suddenly blank screen, spectators are exorcised from filmic place and left hovering in a state of curiosity, on the cusp of something emergent and undefined. This curiosity is the film’s lingering gift, one that might open up possibilities for seeing anew. Through bearing witness to the world through her camera and her characters, Naomi Kawase has crafted a film that overwhelms viewers through the sublimity and strangeness of its space. Yet the overwhelming nature of Vision, much like its titular plant, has radical, transformative potential for the spectator in relating to all aspects of their surrounding world.
Katherine Connell is a PhD candidate at York University, Toronto
1 Hölsgens, Sander, ‘Filming Too Close: Naomi Kawase and The Caring Filmic Gesture‘, Another Gaze, 11 July 2018, 2 Goodfellow, Melanie. ‘Juliette Binoche to Star in Naomi Kawase’s Vision‘, Screen Daily, 7 September 2017 3 Ibid. 4 Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, 2000.
