By Thomas Puhr.
The kind of release that makes you appreciate the untapped reservoir (at least for Western audiences) that is contemporary world cinema, and wish for more home video releases like it.”
When we first see Yoshika, she is knee deep in a quarter-life crisis. “I’m such a wimp!” she admonishes herself in the opening shot of Akiko Ohku’s playful romantic comedy, Tremble All You Want (Japan, 2017): “I think all kinds of things, but I can’t say any of them.” As played by the wonderful Mayu Matsuoka (Koreeda fans will recognize her from 2018’s Shoplifters), Yoshika is the epitome of post-college uncertainty and self-consciousness. In a film that walks the razor’s edge separating the earnest from the precious (and with admittedly mixed results), Matsuoka is a much-needed anchor. We always believe her, even when the narrative she occupies stumbles.
Based on Risa Wataya’s cult novel of the same name, Ohku’s breakout film tracks Yoshika’s conflicted relationship with two men, whom she nicknames “One” (Takumi Kitamura) and “Two” (Daichi Watanabe); the former is a childhood crush with whom she tries to reestablish contact through a middle school reunion, the latter an oafish but likable coworker who makes clerical errors like “1 + 1 = 1” (such symbolism may be a bit heavy footed, but it gets the job done). Watching this adaptation, I was reminded more than once of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021). But whereas Trier gives his protagonist the chance to realize she doesn’thave to make a choice between her two romantic prospects (that she can be quite happy with neither), Ohku’s is trapped in a narrative that presupposes she has to end up with someone. In this respect, the film feels strangely dated at times – less an empathetic portrait of a young woman’s naivete than an overindulgence of it.
As such, the film succeeds when it focuses less on Yoshika’s love life and more on immersing the viewer in her frenetic imagination. Her flights of fancy – and the deep sadness lurking beneath their veneer of affected quirkiness – provide the film’s most rewarding moments. An ongoing gag, for instance, involves imagined conversations the young woman has with people she encounters – a woman on the bus, a hip young waitress, an older fisherman – in her daily life. When we glimpse the reality behind these scenes (through a musical number, ironically enough), the contrast elicits genuine pathos. It’s when Ohku simultaneously indulges and undercuts genre tropes (hence, delivering a gut punch of a reality check by way of a cutesy song and dance routine) that Tremble All You Want really finds its groove.
Among Kani Releasing’s special features, an interview with Ohku provides a framework for better appreciating the film. It can be all too easy (and something of a critical escape hatch) to draw a clear line between a creator and their characters, but it’s hard to avoid such comparisons in this case, not least of which because the writer-director makes them herself. Ohku explains how, like Yoshika, she learned to look beyond herself during this particular production. “With Tremble All You Want,” she says, “I felt like I could finally start seeing the people who wanted to watch my films.” Recalling the work’s enthusiastic reception at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, she describes a “hugely joyful moment, that feeling of finally being seen.” Isn’t such acknowledgement – knowing you’re not alone, after all – exactly what Yoshika seeks?
This emphasis on looking beyond the self, on reaching out and connecting with others, seems to have informed the style of the other special features: interviews with costume designer Mari Miyamoto and music supervisor Masaki Takano. Miyamoto describes her relationship with the director as one characterized by “continuously contributing to each other’s success, being prolific together.” In a similar vein, Takano compares the recursive process of sonic design to “a relay; we [he and Ohku] go back and forth like this, like a tennis rally.” Indeed, one walks away from these interviews with the distinct impression that Ohku aspires to establish close working relationships – ones based on an openness to change – with her colleagues.
These interviews also dig into the nuts and bolts of Miyamoto’s and Takano’s work. The former, we learn, was characterized by a desire to express both Yoshika’s vibrant imagination (lots of orange- and blue-hued clothing) and painful insecurity (Ohku compares the protagonist’s layered clothing to “fighting gear”). The latter was informed just as much by happy accidents as it was by careful planning and preparation; Takano reveals how, while filming the abovementioned musical number, Matsuoka had to sing without any background music when her receiver got disconnected. The resulting footage shows the character barreling through the lyrics, heedless of the instrumental accompaniment’s tempo. “I was glad the receiver broke at this part,” Takano says, “because her emotions were explosive…If it was matched to the temp here, it would have just followed the timing.” It’s a fascinating insight, one which underlines how in-the-moment hiccups can produce something magical.
Tremble All You Want is the kind of release that makes you appreciate the untapped reservoir (at least for Western audiences) that is contemporary world cinema, and wish for more home video releases like it. Kani is doing a great service here (cofounder Ariel Esteban Cayer calls Ohku “one of contemporary cinema’s best-kept secrets” in his accompanying essay), and those interested in a romantic comedy not churned out by Netflix algorithms can do far, far worse than this flawed – but often disarmingly beautiful – gem.
Thomas Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published “‘Mysterious Appearances’ in Jonathan Glazer’s Identity Trilogy: Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin” in issue 15.2 of Film International.