Domains (2019)

Director: Natsuka Kusano

Screenplay: Tomoyuki Takahashi

Cast: Asami Shibuya as Aki Takemoto; Tomo Kasajima as Nodoka; Adachi Tomomitsu as Naoto

In a room, a woman named Aki is being read her own statement by a member of the legal system, confessing to having drowned the daughter of an old female friend whilst visiting the family. Recounted for clarification and confirmation, we learn of the premise. Most films would flashback - to how this woman, who knew her friend since childhood, would push her infant daughter off a bridge during a storm. Domains however cuts to the actors (Asami Shibuya as Aki, Tomo Kasajima as her old friend Nodoka and Adachi Tomomitsu as the latter's husband Naoto) reading out lines as one would do for dress rehearsals, and this entire film for two and a half hours is a hypothetical film which conjures this tale entirely in the viewer's imagination.

Domains' director Natsuka Kusano is a new figure. She is helped by screenwriter Tomoyuki Takahashi, who is of note as he helped write the script to Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Happy Hour (2015). Happy Hour was a drama over five hour longs, where the four actresses playing the four female friends in their mind-thirties collaborated in the production. It is a great film, but alongside its scope in length, it had moments which disrupt conventions of storytelling that are usually expected for simplicity. One such moment, comparable to Domains, is the first hour having a retreat with a workshop that lasts a long time in length, entirely built on characters talking and interacting. Domains take a very meaningful and complex plot, based on very dark subject matter, but tells it not through the images but performance and repetition.

The scenes we see are only a handful but, if locked into the film's groove, they acquire greater meaning. The friend Nodoka is married to a teacher Naoto, a very strict man whose over protectiveness with his daughter is problematic as it is insinuated by our lead that her friend was being ground down by work and home life. Said lead Aki is also complex, a woman who had just stopped going to work and is suffering though clear issues herself, which the husband sees as a bad influence on his daughter. When the girl, never role played by a child actor but a literal invisible kid for the dining room scene, develops a fever is the moment the tensions mount, as he even accuses Aki to her face that she should go to a mental asylum, believing her psychological issues are infectious to his child. He convinces his wife to ask the lead to leave, straining a childhood friendship, but a storm prevents anyone from leaving to back home.

Acted between staged performance and takes of a film, Domains breaks the fourth wall continually with clapper boards and cameras seen, the repetition is to be accepted or becomes a detriment. The one flaw I had is that Natsuka Kusano and Tomoyuki Takahashi did not embrace the style fully, Domains a film that should have visually taken the formalist aesthetic in direction whilst the script should have taken its deconstruction even further to an extreme. What is there however, getting into this groove as I was prepared for what was supposed to be a difficult film, is fascinating in still having a very emotional drama whilst also playing to the viewer's imagination.

The few scenes through the film build in layers as they repeat. The most prominent scene for me is at the dining table. The women have a low view of the husband's place of work, a school which is viewed by them to be full of delinquents and for an art teacher like himself only to find inspiration in graffiti. He denies this, defending the school as having improved, showing however the more the scene and his lines are repeated a sense of wanting to be seen as more respectable, his role as a teacher likely to have unfortunately influenced his parenting as it accused to be to a detriment. Likewise an anecdote of the two female characters' childhood, building a makeshift fort, becomes important with the sense Aki has a fixation over the other in terms of this friendship, which is changed when it is severed. This is also important from a code they created for entry in the fort, which develops greater ominous weight when it comes to the lead with the daughter, realising the girl "is not her" in a stressful moment where, without previous malice, a violent thought passes her mind at a tipping point.

Scenes and ideas like this are inferred to only. The viewer has to conjure and construct these images in thought. The one exception, suggesting an alternative path for the film which is never goes down, is when a scene is replayed in a street as an actual fully developed sequence, a sudden shock with great effect. The film in its very nature is abstract in the sense that removing the signifiers, telling not by images the plot but recreating them in how the storytellers talk of them and "act" their lines, unconventional in that like literature you have to construct them in one's thoughts and are given enough times over each scene for these recreations to evolve over time. I did not find anything a struggle at all, probably because more extreme examples of this are in existence like the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, the logical extreme to this style where (even in period costume and locations) their actors are taught to act in a subdued form, with little beyond the actors talking to work from for more difficult text choices and extreme minimalism.

Domains would work as a stage play, on stage or the audience permitted to look over the casts' shoulders without interacting, very much also in an area like Dogville (2003) with even less cast and props. It works as a film though as this repetition of a novelette of scenes, which grows in nuisance, leads to them become new again as you reconsider what they mean. Against, it may have taken this further if formal rigidness was used more, but Domains' artistic presentation is a reward, especially because the story has actual weight to it. One which is a very complex one when unpicked - friendship being darkened, questions of traditional roles for women and criticisms of parenting, even the taboo of whether family life and children is a good thing for every person. These themes overlap every time a scene replays and changes, lines hard so many times idiosyncrasies develop. Even in one viewing, this is a rare film where you can gain the level of knowledge one would usually get from rewatching a whole feature, which is a rare thing to say, which makes one wonder how rewatching such a production would change Domains' tone over time.  

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Minimalist/Repetitious

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium