Some movies are long because they need to be and some just don’t respect our time. This one plays a wobbly three-minute piano song over black with the opening title, and I’m already suspicious. Some guys talk shit over drinks, then piano, farmers, polaroids. People are filmed from a far-off obscure angle with locked-down camera, so I’m not sure if the couple of people organizing these bunches of daikons and talking about past new year holidays have been in the movie before. A guy facing away from us tells a long story about passing an exam when he was 24.
This is what I imagine Oxhide was like:
I made it the length of a normal movie before I started fast-forwarding – that seems fair. I learned that every 100 minutes there’s a chapter break, and there are some good birds (below) in section two. Tayoko’s husband gets sick and dies at the end.
Mark Peranson says I missed out:
Though the process of watching the onset of life’s end yields gut-wrenching moments, some recorded, some reconstructed, it makes little sense to extract one scene from the whole picture, as the film’s ultimate strength lies in its refusal to privilege, well, anything: an image of a tree means as much as a visit to an onsen, three people walking in the dark, a farmer hoeing her land, or a black screen with no image at all, only an intricately composed soundscape (as the quote introducing the film reads, “Until the moment you are dead you can still hear”).
Winter:
We entered into pre-production imagining that the film, in part, would be some sort of portrait of Tayoko and her husband, Junji. He had been diagnosed with a heart ailment and had been given one to two years to live. And so we imagined that some of what we would be filming would end up being their last months together. However, two weeks before we were to begin, Junji suddenly died … In the last year of Junji’s life, there had been tension and arguments in their marriage. The sort of thing that hadn’t much occurred since their first couple of years together. And Tayoko was remorseful that things had ended this way. But in those few days after his death, as she talked to Junji at the shrine set up for him in the house, the facts of her faith were revealed. She knew with certainty that Junji could still see and hear everything she was doing and saying: expressions of love and sorrow and apology. And, in seeing this, what would be the undergirding of the film was revealed. The film, at least in part, could, for Tayoko, be a second chance. A chance to go back, to relive the previous year, and to do the things she wished she’d done with Junji and to say the things she wished she’d said, knowing that he would be watching and listening. Tayoko was moved enough by this proposal that we agreed we’d weave these sorts of moments in throughout the film. To do this, we cast Junji’s childhood friend, Iwahana, to play the role of Junji. And from there we got back to work.
