As with many modern dress Japanese films, the slightly exaggerated ambient soundtrack is well accomplished. From the start its volume seems constantly, ever so slightly increasing. That's the only clue, unless you were unlucky enough to catch a trailer, or so unwise as to read a review like this one, that these sounds are about to vanish.
Funny thing about Riho Makise with that Jean d'arc haircut. Nothing much, perhaps, to do with the story, but she hardly looks Asian. Take her on that straw-basket bicycle, plop the combo down in black and white or even color Paris, and she's French. Ditto, Rome, Italian. A different and more appropriate take on the hair, is it's very much the hair of an invalid. In two senses. It's hair for convalescing, coma hair. If one comes out of a coma, then wasn't the coma a convalescence? For the second sense, look again at "invalid." We rush by it, fooled by familiarity, but "un...valid," not valid, not true, not live, not real, not reality, not here. The hair's also, of course, practical and attractive, but that's not the point. That it's artist's hair, bohemian hair, may be closer to either take on "invalid."
Funny thing about the film, and I don't know whether it's deliberate, a function of budget (the small cast), or whatever, is Maki has no past. No yesterday, no last week, no school days, no childhood. No father, no extended family, no friends save her mother. Save her mother, no one misses her. Hyper-awareness of ambient sound belongs to the lone or lonely, to the idle, or, differently, to the gregarious or busy who have the wisdom to have learned how to be quiet and alone. Go back, reconsider the longish pre-accident portion of the film, and I think you'll find it, despite the sound effects, nearly as sterile as the post-accident portion. Look at the film's very short final section: daughter, mother, and telephone guy: just as sterile. Where are the other patients, the hospital staff, the sounds of the outdoors beyond the special-effect wind? This is reality? This is healing? The looks on their faces, yes, but...
A glance at director Hirayama's filmography yields little. Nothing knowable from Oakland, anyway, little clue whether irony is one of his tools.
Here's another take, though, on the sameness of the film's sections. Some painters--I'm no expert, but think of Cezanne and Picasso--have used techniques of line and texture to flatten their subjects, to bring background and foreground, shadow and light, even past, present, future, even, say, nose, buttocks, eye into a single plane. Maki's mezzo-print art, of course, does just this, and we see her beautify, by flattening, the phone guy's exotic tree. The sameness of sections, whether Hirayama "did" it or not, turns Turn into a sort of ronde. If you've got the DVD, watch the first section once you've finished the last. See what insights you gain. What do you lose, if anything, second time round?
Touchpoints? After Life; A Brief Vacation; Himitsu; The Sweet Hereafter; The Milk of Human Kindness; Pane e tulipani; Dimension Travelers; Sorry, Wrong Number; Solaris, Solyaris, or the book for the reality-seeking dialogs between Kelvin and Rhea. Antonioni's stark cityscapes. The maudlin snow in Turn I could have done without, but: famous last paragraph to James Joyce's The Dead. Evil Dead Trap has empty sets and a heroine who is but doesn't look Japanese.
Awful lot of stuff for a film I found just okay.
