What
does it take to make a person hasten the extinction of their own species? In
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem,
witnessing the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution causes a highly trained scientist
to lose all her fellowship with humanity. In the case of Sakurai, it is the
promise of an exclusive story to end all exclusives, but to be fair, he isn’t
really human. He is a journalist. The question of what it truly means to be
human is examined on philosophical and emotional levels in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Before We Vanish (trailer here), which screened as a Main Slate
selection of the 55th New York Film Festival.
Narumi
Kase’s salaryman husband Shinji has been acting weird ever since an alien
parasite commandeered his body, but he is actually easier to live with. He is
one of three alien scouts collecting information in advance of the apocalyptic
invasion. The aliens don’t write bureaucratic reports. Instead, they retrieve
entire human concepts, like “work” and “family” straight from human’s brains.
Rather inconveniently, the process erases all comprehension of the concepts
from the minds of their mere mortal subjects. However, alien Shinji will not do
that to his human wife, because he has appointed her to serve as his “guide”
during the recon mission.
While
working the story of Akira Tachibana, a parasite-carrying teen suspected of
gruesomely murdering her family, Sakurai is approached by the cocky young Amano,
who asks the journalist to be his guide while he is on earth. Initially, he
agrees to humor the strange slacker, but he soon finds himself in over his
head. Sakurai is indeed helping to usher in the alien invasion, which horrifies
him. Yet, he might be sufficiently curious and disillusioned to play out his
part to the end.
Although
recent films like Journey to the Shore and
REAL have been criminally
underappreciated by critics, nobody has been better at realizing intellectually
challenging and psychologically sensitive science fiction. This is especially
true of Vanish, which Kurosawa and
Sachiko Tanaka adapted from a stage play by Tomohiro Maekawa. Their screenplay
directly asks viewers to really question what things like love and family mean
to us. Believe it or not, it also presents the organized Christianity in a
highly favorable light. Yet, more than anything, it is a love story between
Narumi and alien Shinji, who seems to identify and amplify the best of who
human Shinji was, from the dormant kernel remaining inside him.
Masami
Nagasawa is absolutely terrific as Narumi Kase. It is a grounded but
surprisingly soulful portrayal of a woman facing unimaginably cosmic challenges
as well as the undignified trials of everyday life, facing them on roughly equal
footing. She also develops tremendous chemistry with Ryuhei Matsuda’s alien
Shinji. It is a tricky part for him, because the body-snatched salaryman is
necessarily distant and socially awkward, yet he subtly but perceptibly shows
hints of his growing emotional attachment to Narumi.
