Au bout du monde

As soaring as Atsuko Maeda's rendition of Edith Piaf's Hymne à l'Amour is to the backdrop of the mountains surrounding Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this is a rather flat film. Maeda plays a TV journalist traveling with a small crew to capture a travelogue of sorts. In some of the film's best moments, we see her flip her TV personality on like a light switch and become animated, which is quite a contrast to the pensive person she is while not on camera. We also see how she's treated a bit like a prop by the crew, certainly not being in control and forced, for example, to ride a nausea-inducing rickety deathtrap of an amusement park ride more than once, with little regard for what it was doing to her. As a young woman, she's also eyed warily by the locals, but we ultimately see that they are reasonable and kind, which was probably part of the film's larger goal, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relationship between Japan and Uzbekistan.

Unfortunately, director (and writer) Kiyoshi Kurosawa just didn't put together a compelling enough story, or to expand on its numerous subplots in a satisfying way. The forced labor to build the Navoi Theater by Japanese POW's after WWII was mentioned but undeveloped further, and other incidents like the young woman's boyfriend being at risk because of a fire in Tokyo she sees on the TV felt the same way, just failed attempts at plot escalation. She wanders aimlessly and awkwardly (if not recklessly) through markets, perhaps a metaphor for her character aimlessly moving through life in a job she doesn't enjoy when her real passion is singing, but I didn't feel any real soul searching here. It's unfortunate because being transported to Uzbekistan, the culture clash, the window into the artificiality of tourism, and the main character's personal crisis were all of interest to me, and I feel the film could have been so much better. It had its moments though.

Yoko, a young Japanese reporter (Atsuko Maeda, actress and pop singer) and her team travel to Uzbekistan for a Japanese TV travel program.

Kishoyi Kurosawa's film is quite unclassifiable. It's a drama, but with moments of comedy, some of them disturbing, with Yoko going through various awkward and sometimes unusual situations. Up to the End ... is an unpredictable film that surprises at all times with the vicissitudes of the protagonist of it, with the consequent and necessary changes of registry of her. Despite this, the film retains its coherence from beginning to end, in part because of the figure of her protagonist, fragile but curious and determined.

Certain cultural clashes, the differences of opinion with her team, her iron and tenacious professionalism, the postponed vocations and Yoko's dreams add to an almost documentary record of the exotic locations through which they pass that never falls into the picturesqueness.

Yes, there's no denying it, the Japanese are the modern masters of schmaltz, and this film is a perfect example. Yoko is a 'reporter' for a low-rent Japanese travel show whose talent consists of reeling off inane comments to camera in a squeaky, excitable voice, often after having been subjected to low-grade torture by her uninspired director. The film's ostensible narrative thrust concerns Yoko's artistic awakening as she finally manages to connect with her true emotions. Yes, it's that bad, and the final payoff is supremely unconvincing.

The film's one redeeming quality comes from a couple of subtexts concerning Japanese xenophobia and the gross inanity of the pop-culture ethos. Yoko blithely wanders into a restricted area and is so scared of the locals that she runs from the police when they approach her to check what she had been filming. The director is obsessed with filming a rare fish, but merrily waltzes right past the glories of Samarkand's Registan Square. But these aren't enough to redeem the film as a whole.

Hands down my most favorite film I've seen this year on Mubi. Truly honest cinema. I know I say this every time I watch anything exceptional, but this here is a very special film I want you all to experience in the theater before it leaves.

Following a naive Japanese woman reporter and her crew in Uzbekistan, we get to accompany a trip in which everything never goes according to plan and the locals never seem to appreciate their presence. It tells a story of how a failed effort to produce a typical shallow travel variety show turns into a journey of self-realization and genuine human contact. A treatise on the diminishing possibility of meaningful intercultural exchange under the current stage of global capitalism, but also its precious value.

Kurosawa's meta-travel documentary piece masterfully dissects the superficiality of globalization, the culture of tourism made possible by the elimination of space through time-that flexible intercontinental mobility of air travel and the instantaneity of digital media-which should serve to bring cultures together, yet paradoxically, ultimately pulls them apart. Sitting in front of TVs and computers, we screen alien cultures in the comfort of our couch, oblivious to the unimaginable life that goes on behind the colorful scenes.

It's a profound meditation on what it means to be a traveller rather than a tourist, to be a participant rather than a spectator, to look past the shiny surface of capitalism's reductive mediatization of differences. It's an invitation to get lost and then, from those in-between places of otherness, stumble upon a way.

As Shuji Terayama would have said: throw away your maps, wander in the bazaars!