“It’s like I’m tossed out in the world and I don’t know which way to go.” This year’s Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film, marks the 11th year of North America’s largest festival of new Japanese cinema. The annual selection aims to represent the diversity of Japanese culture, with its infinite microcosms and niches, an opposition to the common misconception of Japanese cultural homogeneity. The selection ranges from independent productions to blockbusters, documentaries to animations.
Written and directed by Takuro Nakamura, “West North West” explores the intricacies of sexuality, love, youth, religion, and culture. Nakamura tells the story of three girls in Japan, Kei (Hanae Kan), Ai (Yûka Yamauchi), and Naima (Sahel Rosa), as they each struggle to find peace with their own, different sense of loneliness. The film is preoccupied with the existential feelings of sadness and isolation, and d.p. Yasutaka Sekine captures such feelings by reveling in dark shadows and blueish tones.
Naima is a student from Iran, who had come Japan to study Japanese art. She is shy and studious, who does not quite fit in with the community because of her religious devotion and her natural timidity. Naima and Kei gravitate towards each other from the very beginning. Their mutual sadness quickly and forcefully attract each other, and Kei’s girlfriend Ai perceives their mysterious tension even before Kei and Naima are able to process the intensity of their friendship. The painful triangular engagement ensues.
“West North West” not only shines light on the tabooed subject of homosexuality in Asia, but also on the unlikely cultural exchange of East Asia and the Middle East. Naima prays five times a day, always towards west-northwest according to her compass. When Naima’s compass fails to work at Kei’s home, Kei believes the magnetic field in her home is off, which prompts her to utter defeatedly, “It’s like I’m tossed out in the world and I don’t know which way to go.” What Kei, Naima, and Ai are in search of is a kind of spiritual pull of the universe, a guidance out of their overwhelming melancholy. But the conclusion of the film has only one banality to offer them: reality.
