Winner of the Jury Prize in Karlovy Vary's Proxima competition, director Shuntaro Uchida's coming-of-age tale dulls the edges of its intriguing central protagonist.
Observing a seemingly ordinary world through the lens of teenhood can be a goldmine for filmmakers. From the perspective of young people who often feel awkward and out of place, common dynamics can look strange, while unexpected connections seem like the most natural thing in the world. Shuntaro Uchida’s “Incinerator”, which won the Jury Prize in the Proxima competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, is of most interest for its peculiar lead protagonist, ten-year-old Kozue (played by a young actress credited simply as Karin). In her peaceful neighborhood outside Tokyo, this loner spends more time observing her surroundings than acting upon them, save for her habit of regularly stealing random objects to throw into the school incinerator. But while Kozue is a genuine, unapologetic weirdo, the film that is constructed around her soon betrays a less imaginative, more normative impulse — so much so that this coming-of-age story ultimately leaves a bitter taste.
“Incinerator” wears its arthouse credentials lightly. Despite the film’s slow-cinema touches, its storytelling structure and emotionality — even though muted and quiet — recall instead the melodrama at its most facile. The characterization of Kozue’s parents feels especially slim, their clichéd attributes easy shortcuts to emotion. The mother is overworked, caring for the entire household but also for Kozue’s ailing and critical grandmother, while the father is an affable deadbeat; despite the film’s attempts to humanize them, they feel more like signifiers for “mom and dad” than actual characters.
In the middle of this familiar matrix, Kozue’s offbeat behavior stands out, creating initially intriguing situations and contrasts. As her mother gets home from work, for example, she once finds Kozue lying face down on the floor for no particular reason. The child isn’t loquacious, and neither is she interested in being understood, which would seem to open up the film to more original avenues than traditionally found in coming-of-agers. But the parents’ main reaction to their child’s eccentricity does not extend far beyond bemusement, and likewise the filmmakers can find little more to do with the character than wonder at how different she is.
Long, uneventful sequences capturing Kozue’s idle days spent daydreaming in nature or by the incinerator soon come to feel purposeless. If their goal is to grant access to her particular perspective, then that perspective seems only that of a bored and aloof tween. Kozue spends much of her time simply looking around, and there is pleasure to be had in the film’s soothing color palette and soft cinematography. But the promise of something more meaningful from these sequences is never fulfilled.
The issue might run deeper than the script, however: Even once something significant does happen to the young girl, the incident barely seems to register in the film’s emotional landscape. One day, Kozue locks eyes with Jinta, a young man who is visiting the school to perform a shadow-puppet show. Jinta is played by Taiki Shinozuka, heartthrob member of the Japanese boyband Timelesz; Kozue, however, seems interested in him not for his looks but for the way he moves through the world. He appears to operate on a different wavelength from everybody else — everybody, except for Kozue.
But neither Kozue nor Jinta seem in any way changed by their meeting. When she asks him to take her for a ride to a small village she remembers from childhood, the two then spend some time walking around the idyllic countryside, before returning home: This was not the place Kozue remembered, after all. What to derive from this sequence beyond a series of banal aphorisms about time passing and memories fading? Or from the deadpan goodbye Kozue and Jinta exchange after this trip: that sometimes we cross paths with people, and it feels like it might be meaningful, but it isn’t — except that it also sort of is?
Japanese author Kaori Ekuni, whose short story the film is based on, is often described as the “female Murakami”, and like adaptations of that other author’s work, “Incinerator” seeks to pause on moments both strange and ordinary, and let them unfold in whatever way they might. But nothing special happens, and no surprising meanings or emotions arise here. From its promising introduction of a strange little girl, “Incinerator” then trades in ordinary observations and emotions, as though afraid to force a point in any particular direction. What remains are cinematic aphorisms that may well be true, but cannot alone tell a compelling story.