Mio on the Shore (2019)

Original title: わたしは光をにぎっている

Quiet and socially awkward orphan Mio (Honoka Matsumoto) has been helping her aunt and her grandmother with the family inn in Nagano. When her grandmother is hospitalized (I assume in the Japanese version of a hospice) and her aunt decides to sell the inn, she is sent to Tokyo to get on her own feet there. Until she can afford it, she is living with an old buddy of her father’s, Kyosuke (Ken Mitsuishi), the owner of a traditional bath house. He’s rather rough around the edges, and clearly desperately sad, so the first encounters between the grumpy older man and the painfully shy young woman are difficult. It doesn’t help the situation that Mio’s really not made for the kind of part time jobs she can get, lacking in confidence and social courage.

Eventually, she starts helping Kyosuke out in the bath house, slowly winning confidence, a new social circle, and perhaps the perspective on a future and a life that fits her.

Mio on the Shore by Ryutaro Nakagawa is so quiet and unassuming in its manner – not unlike its protagonist though not as awkward - one might easily overlook just how good it actually is. In fact, it may very well be one of the best coming of age movies made by anyone, not grasping for the bizarrely heroic tone the genre can sometimes take on particularly in American hands, but treating most of what’s happening in it with a calm eye for the tragedies and small triumphs in the lives of people that don’t quite fit into the modern world, for reasons of class, of personal character, or simply of bad luck, without going the poverty porn route or having Frances McDormand go around interviewing amateur actors.

It’s a film all about small gestures, except for that one moment when it suddenly goes into a rousing diatribe against gentrification, which I found confusing but not unfitting and that scene of transcendent insight Mio is granted eventually, both of which are treated so personally and intimate, they never feel like the wrong grand gestures for the film. Otherwise, this really is a film all about small changes, the shift in Mio’s posture when she starts dare talking to people as if she started recognizing herself as one of them, the way her eyes start to meet those of others, if only a little, and sometimes. Which is as honest a way of treating her and her developing view of the world as you’d encounter in a movie, lacking all the kitschy patronizing this sort of thing can all too often end up with. Matsumoto is fantastic in the role, using glances, and body language that I found nearly painfully authentic, all the while avoiding the threat of turning Mio into a caricature instead of a living human being.

Typically for a Japanese film, Mio is very interested in the culturally specificity of people and places, not out of conservatism, but because these specifics are what have shaped its main character, and built the society in where she looks for a place not so much to fit in as for one to belong. There’s a quiet insistence on the social aspects of life here too, as well as a realization that it’s not enough for any human to find a place and people that allow her to fit in, but also one she wants to belong to, and feel at home in. There’s a pretty obvious criticism of modern life (in Japan and elsewhere) here, but Mio on the Shore isn’t a polemical, nor a didactic, film. Rather, it is one that uses the personal and the specific to open up an understanding of the world.