Kawamura | 2025 | Japan

Oh yes, thank you very much. I am a sucker for a simple premise infused with layers of pathos and, importantly, executed more or less to perfection. Right when I was talking about cycles (regarding Last Night in Soho), along comes a literal representation of the psycho-cyclical essence of life as we cognitively and emotionally encounter it. That the cycle is guilt is of secondary importance to the idea that such cycles intersect with the similar cycles of others (and that we ignore this at our peril). This is rendered rather literally here – only by taking note of deviations can our hero hope to escape.

Speaking of cycles and guilt, it just so happens that Camus’ final cycle of creative output focused on guilt. The novel component of this cycle – La Chute [The Fall] – is my favourite of his novels. Every word of the book is the spoken dialogue of the central character, a self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’ haunted by a heroic endeavour he did not undertake out of fear and cowardice.

Surviving merely to judge himself and anybody unfortunate enough to get dragged into hearing his tale, he completes the telling of that tale by concluding that, presented with the same scenario in which we initially failed, we would only fail again:

A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr…. the water is so cold! But let’s reassure ourselves. It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

The magic of this movie is that it does not agree.