• 由宇子の天秤 (A Balance)

9/25/21 (Sat), Tokyo

The second feature by 40-something director/writer Harumoto Yujiro. The English title is lame: the “balance” (tenbin) in the Japanese title (literally Yuko’s Tenbin) refers to a set of scales like those held by Lady Justice. Here, documentary filmmaker Yuko is forced to weigh her values when the tables turn on her and the subject becomes the prey.

Yuko (Takiuchi Kumi, terrific) is in charge of a documentary about a high school student who committed suicide. The school had suggested that this was due to an unhappy affair with a teacher, prompting a media storm that led the teacher to take his own life. The producers want her to paint a story of the evil teacher taking advantage of the hapless student. Yuko’s investigation, however, suggests another possibility: the student may not have had an affair at all but took her life due to bullying, which would make the school culpable. That is, the school may have cooked up the student-teacher relation to dodge its own responsibility. Moreover, that would open questions over the media’s own role not only in driving the accused teacher to take his life but in continuing to haunt the lives of those left behind. In particular, the teacher’s mother and sister have come under unbearable pressure from society for simply being who they are and are now in virtual hiding. The producers naturally aren’t happy with this more complicated scenario, not least because it bites the hand that feeds them, but Yuko is determined to pursue the truth wherever it leads.

Unfortunately life throws a wrench in the works when Yuko discovers that her father (Mitsuishi Ken, a dead ringer for Ogata Issey) has had an affair with a 17-year-old student (Kawai Yumi) in his cram school – a mirror image of the scandal in her documentary. Moreover, the student reveals not only that she is pregnant with the father’s child but that the sex came in lieu of school fees, making the story even sleazier. The terrified student, who lives in a cramped apartment with her widowed and sometimes violent father (a very good Umeda Masahiro), turns in confidence to Yuko for help. Worse, Yuko learns that complications with the pregnancy actually threaten the girl’s life, something that the girl herself does not know. Taking her to the hospital or talking with her father would risk exposure for all involved; an illegal abortion drug offers a way out but carries severe legal and medical risks. Facing her father’s potential ruin and the inevitable fallout on her own life for the crime of being her father’s daughter, Yuko is forced to rethink the situation from the opposite perspective.

The film offers a balanced and thoughtful examination of issues that, while perhaps not unique to Japan, are amplified by a heavy emphasis on group ties and intense pressure to conform. In one moving sequence, the small daughter of the teacher who committed suicide asks Yuko innocently what “血筋” (“It’s in your blood”) means, indicating that she is already being teased by her own peers for something they’ve presumably heard from their parents and probably don’t understand themselves. Yuko’s tenbin is unbalanced as well by the realization that the truth could hurt not only herself but innocent victims.

The story is rather slow moving and takes a turn to the melodramatic at the end, when the writer/director seems to have run out of either time or courage. The various flip-flops – the dead teacher’s sister was holding back vital information that actually implicates him, the student’s child may not in fact belong to Yuko’s father – are intended to highlight the question of just who to trust, but honestly they feel a bit much at that point and dilute the message. Individual moments also jar, such as when Yuko whips out her smartphone to film her father confessing to the tryst, a gesture that was unnatural and unnecessary even allowing for her documentary instincts. It seemed like something tacked on in an attempt to be “interesting” rather than organic to her character, and it’s hard to believe the father would have allowed himself to be filmed in the first place. The script could have used a good dramaturge.

Still, the movie is a solid piece of filmmaking, helped by a bold approach to tough material, dynamic camerawork and good performances all around. Takiuchi was the absolute core of the film with a stoic and understated approach that felt completely real, both as the sympathetic ear to the victims and the distraught center of a potential scandal of her own. Umeda did great work as well in what could have been a stock role, especially in his breakdown, the film’s most moving moment, when he tearfully tells Yuko of his daughter’s confession that she has sold herself for money. While the film strains credibility at times, it is overall a worthwhile and thought-provoking piece.