Autumn Clothes could be a daytime counterpart to O Marinheiro (FID2023), in which we could hear the words of Fernando Pessoa. Same studio, same sea wall. Different journey. Here, the black screen of Yohei Yamakado’s previous film is replaced by the light of spring in Porto, the effusion of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, the sweet feeling of a train pulling into a station, lipstick, ebony hair, a bright blue jacket, three friendly faces, a visit. In O Marinheiro, we could hear Rita Senra reading the text. In Autumn Clothes, there is nothing to be heard, since the film keeps quiet: Yohei Yamakado toys with the codes of silent film. The visiting friend, Mana Haraguchi, finds a book: Autumn Clothes by Ichiyo Iguchi. Then emerges the Japanese language, the filmmaker’s mother tongue. An inner language, it seems to come from elsewhere. Indeed, the director sets a double distance based on a playback: the reading is asynchronous (recorded in a time that isn’t that of the shooting), and the sound of the voice is slightly out of sync with the movement of the lips. From this final, unsettling shift, a gap emerges. That of exile, perhaps. Rita Senra prepares tea for her friend, in small Japanese-looking cups. Shots composed like paintings by Giorgo Morandi or Paul Cézanne combine with elegant superimpositions drawn from the reader’s daydreaming. Every note, color and texture exalts our sensibility. In its refinement and porcelain delicacy, Autumn Clothes makes an existential statement: “Beauty will save the world,” said Dostoyevsky. For Yohei Yamakado, cinema is a land where works and cultures respond to each other, and where all the arts are celebrated. The studio, that “place without dwelling,” that was so dear to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, a place where “something common and therefore meaningful” happens, a “being-with,” is the place “of a being touched by existence.” Thank you for the visit.
Claire Lasolle
