(Movie Review) "Your Name" (2016)

By Vani P Nair -

 

                                                   Movie Review: Your Name (2016)



It was a colleague of mine who insisted that I watch Your Name. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it for some reason. After a couple of weeks, as I lay on my bed at night, wrestling with recalcitrant sleep, I automatically proceeded to click on the link. For some reason, as soon as I started watching it, sleep decided to take me in its warm embrace. This happened several times over the next few days. Eventually, three days into my summer vacation, one night, after all had gone to sleep, I made up my mind to watch it in the darkened room. With the low humming of the air conditioner and my sleeping mother’s deep breath in the background, I found myself slowly getting drawn into the dreamlike, magically enmeshed worlds of Mitsuha Miyamizu and Taki Tachibana.

The movie opens with the visual of a comet falling from the skies towards a nestled township. It is followed by the soothing voice of the main characters expressing a sense of loss and longing for something inexplicable. They seem united in this quest for the unknown. Right from the beginning, it becomes clear that the narrative has an undercurrent of interlacing cosmic and terrestrial forces, as if leading upto the manifestation of some long-lost prophesy. It helps the viewer secure a balance between fear and assurance, much like Mitsuha and Taki. One wonders what ails these gentle souls? There seems to be something ethereal connecting them, though separated by time and space. We cannot but keep pace with them as they walk towards their uncharted yet shared destinies.

Mitsuha is a teenager living in the tranquil hamlet of Itomori and Taki is a slightly older boy living in the bustling city of Tokyo. They have never met each other, nor are they related in any way. However, unbidden, they suddenly start swapping bodies, much to their chagrin. The initial shock and mortification, in due course, make way for curiosity and resignation. They begin to subtly transform each other’s existence for the better. While Taki makes Mitsuha more popular and assertive among her peers, Mitsuha brings Taki closer to his crush at work. I loved the fact that the creator steered clear of all gender related fussiness, which could have bordered the story on cliché. It was beautiful how both of them complimented each other while experiencing and appreciating one another’s life. Mitsuha’s sleepy village is drenched in the muted colours of its fragmentary history. 

When her grandmother, Hitoha, recounts the story of The Great Fire of Mayugoro, she insists on the need for the traditions to be handed down even if their meanings are lost to time and tragedies. These performative aspects of culture, according to Hitoha, it is how one connects to the past, adds on to the future and earn one’s place in the continuum of human existence. Hitoha, Mitsuha and her baby sister Yotsuha are the keepers of the Miyamizu family shrine. Though she doesn’t partake in her grandmother’s enthusiasm, Mitsuha performs all the religious rituals to the best of her ability, along with her sister, as the shrine maidens. I found the whole concept of Kuchikamizake (Mouth-chewed Sake), and its role in community bonding very interesting. While Taki leads a relatively isolated existence in the hectic urban landscape, Mitsuha’s life is linked to the community through rituals, shared history and obscure narratives. 

Life takes on a sedate pace at Itomori, and when Taki (after swapping body) accompanies Hitoha and Yotsuha to the place that held the body of their shrine’s god, for offering the Kuchikamizake, it was as if time had slowed down. Taki was wrapped up in Hitoha’s account of the idea of “Musubi”. The journey is beautifully picturized with the three of them descending to the lap of nature and finally approaching the destination. At kataware-doki (dusk), Hitoha looks Mitsuha (Taki) in the eye and asks her if she were dreaming, giving the earliest indication in the film that she had foreknowledge about what was happening. Kataware- doki is when boundaries blur and time and tide align. It is when the impossible events happen, that lack rhyme and reason, and emotions flood your heart and the memory abandons you in an act of challenge. Something cracks inside Taki as he wakes up from the sleep, in his own body, only to find tears streaming down his eyes. Taki was, for the first time, privy to something intimate and sacred; “Musubi” was the connection between everything, even the elusive time, and him and Mitsuha.  

I cannot praise the background score enough at this point. It elevates the ambience immensely and drowns us in its magic. As far as the story goes, the eventuality that awaits Itomori will break your heart into splinters. The urgency of the situation is successfully communicated to the viewers with the just the right amount of drama. Taki’s helplessness and Mitsuha’s resolve take on mythic proportions; not in its scale, rather, in its intensity. Long after they had forgotten how profoundly they had touched each other’s existence, Taki and Mitsuha still experience that inexplicable sense of loss and void, which in turn, extends to us viewers too. 




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