The Mourning Forest by Naomi Kawase: a wander into grief.
In the middle of a harmonious green plain somewhere in Japan, the ring of bells and the sound of men’s prayer follow a funeral procession. At dawn, the mountain is quietly removed from its haze blanket as the elderly, from a small retirement home on top of the hill, are waking up from their foggy dream. Focused on the story of a young nurse named Machiko and an old grieving man named Shigeki, The Mourning Forest can be appreciated through different layers. It can be seen as an intense journey to a completed grief, the film is also an emotional ageless friendship story, and a definite ode to Japanese’s wonderful landscapes.
Born in 1969 in Nara, Japan, Naomi Kawase is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. With her delicate eye, she put images on sensitive human emotions as on those rural Japanese traditions that cradled her throughout childhood. Kawase graduated from the Visual Arts College of Osaka in 1989, then spent 4 years as a lecturer before finally doing what she had always been wanting to do… directing. Drawn towards documentary aesthetics and keened by its ability to be anchored in reality, she soon started to film Embracing, a documentary exploring her own search for the father she never had. With a great deal of interest in autobiography, her films often include extracts of her own difficult life path like in Katatsumori, where she filmed her everyday life with her grandmother, the woman who raised her. In 1995 she was rewarded for both The Mourning Forest and Katatsumori at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival which marks the beginning of her uprising as influential filmmaker.
The Mourning Forest may seem like a minimalist movie, but the parsimonious style is done to the profit of emotional stimulation. In the first third of the story, the young Machiko gently bonds with Shigeki, an old man who is facing dementia in a small and peaceful retirement house, lost in the mountains. As the old man is acting more and more like a child due to his disease, Machiko develops a maternal form of caring for him. The viewer soon understands that these two characters are linked by grief, while the nurse secretly suffers from the loss of her child, the old man is still devoted to his long-time departed wife.
One day, Shigeki cheerfully decides to climb a tree under the happy laugh of the other residents. He falls off and starts running while Machiko follows him, screaming. Then, playing hide and seek in a gratifying field of tube-shaped bushes, for more than four minutes at the screen, the two characters joyfully chuckle out of breath. Running after each other again, they soon disappear in an overwhelming green aerial shot of the precisely carved box tree. On Shigeki's birthday, Machiko takes him for a drive in the abundant countryside. Halfway, the car falls for no apparent reason into a ditch. Machiko runs for help, while Shigeki escapes in a watermelon field. Waiting for her at some time, the old man looks as if he was still playing, but finally entering the abundant and shrouding forest, they embark on a long and sensitive two-day journey of mutual discovery.
Filmed in a documentary-realistic style, the camera shyly follows the characters in their intimacies and interactions inside the delicate and simple setup of the surroundings of Naomi Kawase’s hometown. With no soundtracks all along the movie, Kawase’s talent lies in the almost muted acting of her nonprofessional actors, allowing instead emotions to take the lead. To empathize with the power of the incredible flora that surrounds the characters, she called sound editor David Vranken to create a strong natural sound design using the recording of birdsongs or rainfalls.
Always at the meeting point of realism and chimera, the scenes’ meaning is never literal. Key points remain all along incredibly blurred. The death of Machiko’s son is insinuated by her lighting a candle under the photo of a young boy. The reason why the car hits a ditch at the entrance of the mourning forest is never known. And, even when both are climbing a small riverside amid the forest and a wild water cascade runs over them, Kawase decides to cut and both characters appear faintly wet. These slight blanks of incomprehension are also what encourages the viewer to make unconscious connections whether it be between the characters themselves or to their relationship with nature. All along the movie, the grief process is undeniably linked to the forest, which creates a sort of fantasy around it. At the same time, the forest represents a special spiritual location to mourn and a place that is mourning itself, surely from human abuse.
In the forest Shigeki is leading the march with energy, while the young nurse desperately follows his step through the bushes. She gradually understands, hiking in the forest, that the old man walks with a definite purpose. Exhaustion and raindrops will only stop them for a night. While lighting a fire, Machiko’s motherly instinct kicks back before she starts to cuddle and warm Shigeki until he falls asleep. At dawn, what seems to be an in-between dream and reality, Machiko observes for several instants Shigeki dancing with a young well-dressed woman. In this fantasy sequence, we understand that the old man has entered his mournful journey. After passing next to the roots of an old tree, they finally arrived at what is supposed to be Shigeki’s spouse's grave. Unwrapping the cautiously kept letter he has been writing to his departed wife for 33 years, Shigeki decides to dig at this emplacement while Machiko is quietly making a music box release its melody. Both are stopped for a minute by the powerful sound of a helicopter passing over the forest, but it won’t be enough to take them away from their mission. Lying on the wet soil, Shigeki finally finds peace within his heart. Repeating “for a long time” he thanks the weeping Machiko, who in a leap of faith raised her hand over her head while playing the music box as a sort of magic talisman.
Praised by the Cannes jury in 2007, The Mourning Forest was awarded the Grand Prix, conferred to the movies with the most originality and widest spirit of research of the festival. Naomi Kawase puts in relief the bloom of Japanese people. Their values and beliefs are essential to her cinematographic work. In competition with Hollywood’s blockbusters during the Cannes Festival, she declared that her films offered “the gift of self-reflection” to the audience. Thus, at the end of the movie, the purity of thoughts and the sincerity of the natural outlook makes all your daily contemporary concerns seem quite worthless… Simply powerful, The Mourning Forest is the antithesis of the modern society's disenchantment, and definitely embodies the beauty of pure human emotions.