Films That Witness Madness

review

L'ILYA

Sifting through my DVD collection today, I came across SMALL GAUGE TRAUMA, a collection of short films that have screened at the FanTasia Film Festival through the years. I realized at once that I never watched the whole thing. I bought it because of LOVE FROM MOTHER ONLY and THE SEPARATION, two films that everyone in the know was raving about at the time. Having satisfied my curiosity, I threw it on the shelf and consequently never bothered with it again. I decided that it had sat there unattended to long enough. I loaded it up, sat back and watched away. For the most part I was disappointed - LOVE FROM MOTHER ONLY and THE SEPARATION were as good as I remembered them being but the majority of the other shorts were just plain bad - but as I reached the end of the disc, a quiet, disturbing little film began playing and I fell in love with Japanese cinema all over again.

Tomoya Sato's L'ILYA is a remarkably complex piece of work. It's also incredibly troubling and devastating. It tells the story of a young woman who videotapes - with full consent - the suicides of strangers. As they are preparing themselves - sometimes as they are dying - L'ilya interviews them. At home, she edits the video, overlays music, and adds special effects. She screens the footage at clubs and art exhibits. She even has a promoter. L'ilya meets and records the suicide of a beautiful young woman. Talking to her as she slowly bleeds to death from a slit wrist, L'ilya is at a loss to understand the woman's motives. The woman has recently broken up with her boyfriend, a man she didn't seem to know well at all and never bothered to reconcile with. When L'ilya returns home that night and begins to screen her footage, she finds her boyfriend has killed himself.

Suicide is a common occurrence in Japan. How common? The statistics are rather shocking. Every fifteen minutes someone commits suicide in Japan. In January 2009 alone, 2,645 people in Japan committed suicide. In 2004, a rash of so-called "suicide clubs" sprung up, a disturbing trend that has yet to disappear. In total, Japan has a higher suicide rate than any other wealthy nation, over 33,000 every year for the past decade. L'ILYA, made in 2000, doesn't address the issue socially. Rather, it addresses it in a very personal way.

L'ilya's response to suicide is, perhaps, the same as that of a wartime photographer. For both, death is merely a subject to be captured on film. She is unmoved by the act. It's only after her boyfriend kills himself that L'ilya is affected. Without her distancing mechanism - her video camera - L'ilya has nothing to block out the reality of her boyfriend's death. She begins to question - as everyone who has been affected by suicide does - whether or not she could have prevented it. Her boyfriend's earlier actions and statements - "everyone wants to die", his objections over her using suicide in her work, asking of her "want me to kill myself" when she tells him that no one has contacted her for her services lately - have all the aspects of early warnings or cries for help but L'ilya, separated from the reality of suicide and protected from it's consequences by her art, failed to recognize them as such. And as a result, her boyfriend is dead.

She attempts suicide herself, slitting her wrist in the same way the beautiful woman did earlier. She even imagines a conversation with the dead woman, the parallel between the two becoming clear. As the dead woman videotapes the dying L'ilya, the two have a conversation. L'ilya's revelations - that sometimes we make mistakes or don't listen when we should; that sometimes we only superficially understand another person's pain and that there are some choices that we cannot make for those dear to us, no matter how much we love them - leads her to the film's final heart-breaking scene in the morgue, where she finally puts down her camera and caresses the body of the man she loved.

Essential viewing.

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