I did double-billing pleasure with Director Yûya Ishii.
The first was the slowcore 'Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue'.
It's about 10 million people being invisible to each other, told through a young nurse who obsesses about death, and a construction worker with social skills deficit.
Although it could be classified as romance, there isn't a single kiss. It would probably be better to label it as a depression.
Its unhurried pace made the question of our existence more profound.
The movie is a metaphor for a world that's become faster than human relationships.
I'm glad that I was in the right, patient headspace to absorb it.
Then I watched 'The Great Passage' which I recommend too.
Plot summary
Newcomer Shizuka Ishibashi throws herself into the role of Mika, a nurse by day, a 'girlie bar' hostess by night, subject to feelings of anxiety and isolation, and unable to reach through a hard outer shell that stops her from expressing tenderness to anyone else. Sosuke Ikematsu, one of Japan's most important young actors, stars as Shinji, who struggles as a day-hire construction worker with a sense of impending doom, but who still tries to find the source of an unnamable hope he feels inside. The setting is Tokyo in 2017, where empty words, a sense of doom, and feelings of isolation co-exist with hope, trust, and love. In the sense of real life conjured up in these two people is a new kind of film: the densest kind of love story.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN