In an early scene of Yui Kiyohara’s SUBETE NO YORU WO OMOIDASU (Remembering Every Night), a group of musicians come together in a park to practice for their concert the following day. No sooner have they started playing than two of the members have to leave for work. The group has no playlist planned, has not even rehearsed an entire piece from start to finish. The concert, we sense, is destined to be a disaster; the members agree that they’ll just have to do their best when the time comes.
We don’t encounter the musicians again, though notes of their discordant music accompany the journey of the film’s single day, told through characters crisscrossing in a single neighborhood: a woman in search of employment, a gas meter collector, a student, an elderly man who has lost his way. It isn’t always clear how the characters are connected, and the accumulation of scenes is not one of ascending plot but rather of a poetic structure, building in intensity through patterns and reverberating echoes.
There is a persisting question throughout these brief scenes: what trails do we leave behind in our mundane tasks and errands? What difference do our lives make?
There is something hypnotic about following these people around on their daily tasks, at once ordinary and tender. The film is told almost entirely in public spaces—parks, streets, cafés, a film shop, a museum, an employment office. The myopic, fluid exploration feels at times as if we are watching ants within a colony, moving hither and thither, but belonging to a greater plan.
Empty spaces
By its very nature, the public sphere places emphasis on work—the ways in which we fill our hours, make a living, make ourselves useful. In the film, work takes on a metaphysical quality, even more so because the public spaces where the characters roam are hauntingly empty. Most poignant is Ms. Yamazumi, on whose birthday the film unfolds. She visits an employment office, before heading in search of an address that might offer her work. She runs into an old colleague at a bakery; the two of them sit together for a while. While the colleague eats dessert she’s bought at the bakery, Ms. Yamazumi simply sips from her thermos. It is a scene of quiet heartbreak.
Then there is Mr. Takada wandering in the direction of a former home, towards a time when he carried vitality and purpose in the world. Loudspeakers announce that an elderly man has gone missing. Mr. Takada ignores the calls; after all, he believes himself in another life, even telling the young woman trying to escort him that he must get back to work.
This effect, that the mundanity of everyday life is overlayed by some glimmer of meaning that has disappeared or is just beyond reach, is everywhere in the film’s slow, languorous shots.
There is a persisting question throughout these brief scenes: what trails do we leave behind in our mundane tasks and errands? What difference do our lives make? Two friends visit an archeological museum on the anniversary of their friend Dai’s death. That evening while lighting sparklers in the park, they wonder whether, 4,500 years on, anything will be remembered of Dai, who died so young. “He left no clay figurine, so maybe he will disappear,” one of them says. “I mean, fireworks turn into smoke. That’s just the way things are.”
The Right fit
And what other nights are referred to in the film’s capacious title? Every night spent with a departed friend? Every night of one’s own life? After all, there is but a single night in the film, though the narrative is pocketed with absences, ghostly like the title’s ambiguous remembering. In an early scene, we learn that a character is missing from the keyboard. And later, that Mr. Takada has gone missing. The inhabitants of a house, whom Ms. Yamazumi’s searches for throughout her birthday in hopes of employment, have moved away. We learn that when he was alive, Dai would rather record than participate in activities, as if his disappearance from the earth had already begun shadowing his existence. In his passing, a number of his developed photographs and their negatives went unclaimed. The young man at the film shop who relays this information spends his evening editing home videos of birthdays: vanished moments, vanished ages of childhood. These scenes must have been so important to those who filmed them, yet on this one evening they also seem trivial in their abundance and anonymity. This effect, that the mundanity of everyday life is overlayed by some glimmer of meaning that has disappeared or is just beyond reach, is everywhere in the film’s slow, languorous shots.
Seated in the employment office Ms. Yamazumi asks the clerk whether he has anything that might fit her former work experience, to curtail the poorly matched opportunities he is half-heartedly offering. This continual effort to fit things into their right place, not always with success, remains one of Kiyohara’s most resonant motifs explored over the single day she orchestrates. It is like the quizzical form of the film itself, patched together by trajectories that don’t make up a smooth pattern: the characters get lost, they get held up, they veer off course when their attention drifts. Elsewhere, Dai’s two friends try to assemble the jagged pieces of a replica prehistoric pot, like putting together a puzzle. Mr. Takada wonders why his keys don’t fit the lock of his former home. It is the same feeling that sets off the film, when the young musicians cannot quite manage to bring their notes together in harmony. There is something at once pathetic and endearing in their efforts—the very texture of our human lives.
Ayşegül Savaş, author of the novels “White on White” and “Walking on the Ceiling”, is a writer based in Paris.
