Station (1981)

directed by Yasuo Furuhata

Japan

132 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Good lord. I will try to talk about this movie, but it's impossible for me to put into words the feeling of watching something at just the right time while in exactly the right mood and having it hit me somewhere deep and lasting. I typically mention that my reviews tend more towards me simply getting my thoughts about something out as opposed to looking critically at it, and I'm going to invoke that disclaimer again here, because something about Station had me hooked and I couldn't think about it with any particular angle while I was watching it, although I can do that more easily now after it's over.

There is not much plot to this, and what there is could be easily explained within a few sentences, maybe a short paragraph if we're being eloquent. It's not the type of thing that breaks boundaries in terms of the story it tells. But the tone of the film is what makes it resonate so hard. This movie has such a heavy feeling of loneliness and melancholy without resorting to much of the usual visual code for depicting these things. It's Ken Takakura in the lead role who does most of the work in portraying his character's burden of isolation, regret, and sorrow, and imparts those feelings onto the film as a whole. He shows little to no emotion for most of his time on screen, executing his duties as a policeman and as a member of society to the best of his ability, but the shape of those duties and his struggle to fit into it is what forms the core of Station itself. Despite not being outwardly expressive, we as viewers know what he's going through.

I think the major underlying theme of this film is a sense of duty, expectation, and shame. The first portion takes place in 1968 during the Olympics when they were hosted in Mexico, and there's a sense of national disappointment that Japan is not the host country, which is compounded when a runner representing Japan injures himself and subsequently commits suicide. His long goodbye letter is read aloud in full and it's brutal, hashing out his feelings of inadequacy, of his perceived failure to every person in his family. Towards the end of the film, the main character, as his crisis of self-doubt comes to a head, composes a resignation letter to the police department he worked for, and this letter is read out in full in a direct parallel to the suicide letter at the beginning. Although he remains living, the sense of sundering from what one is expected to do that he expresses in his resignation letter feels tantamount to a kind of suicide. Again, although this is never directly expressed, the character's feelings of not living up to what he's expected to do are a weight that builds through the whole film. It comes out once or twice in scenes where he gets into random fights; useless, unmotivated scraps that reveal the tip of the iceberg of his personal turmoil.

There's just a kind of "cut and run" mentality here: The self-imposed idea that if you feel you've screwed something up beyond fixing, or if you believe you're unworthy or unable to carry something out, you have no choice other than to abandon it and never look back. This comes up multiple times, from the opening scene where the main character leaves behind his wife and child to the entire second act which is him trying to put his past behind him and become someone else, someone he's comfortable being - but of course, it's not that easy to forget.

It is absolutely wild to me that this was made in 1981. It was doing my head in to look at some of the actors and think "If they're 40 here, they're in their 80s today". I hate that I'm saying this about a movie from the 80s, because it still feels like that was about twenty years ago at most, but this really goes to show that if a movie is good, it's good forever. The cinematography is so simple but it feels like so much - the deep snowdrifts dwarfing the human characters, the liminality of a bar with only two people in it late at night, people going about their daily business along the tracks that life has set them on. It's overwhelmingly real sometimes.

And the writing and acting are both such that the characters feel real as well - I don't feel like I have the best perspective on the strength of the script, because I only know a very tiny bit of Japanese and was watching this with subtitles, but I could still tell that every actor put in a near-perfect performance. Chieko Baisho, who plays the bar owner that the main character becomes involved with, somehow managed to capture the feeling of just... looking at somebody else, of seeing someone and talking to them and getting the sense that this is a person who has an entire inner life, who has songs that make them cry, who enjoys particular foods, who has lived and carries experiences with them that make them simultaneously more human but also completely alien, because no one can truly read another person. I know that this is all fictional, that the characters only exist as lines on a page, but the way they're brought to life and the way each person works to compliment and create the overall atmosphere of this film blew me away. You can impart a true and real message through a story that is fictional. Fiction is made up of broken pieces of reality.

I will stop talking about this now, because there's not much more I can say about how this made me feel. This is just one of those things that makes me feel the joy of film as art, storytelling as art. It's just... it just made me feel. If you can interact with and respond to a movie like this, if you can find something that really hits you, it's a very singular feeling. God, this was just so good. I apologize if I seem hyperbolic but it is important to me to be earnest about things that I like.