Two struggling artists are drawn to each other in a relationship of convenience…
I want to start talking about colorless by talking about its end credits. Like so many films, it features white text on a black screen, telling you who worked on the film both in front of and behind the camera. That’s not what’s interesting about it. It’s the song: ‘Seventh Heaven’ by noise pop artist Haru Nemuri. Like so many of her songs, it’s rather loud, slightly unhinged, but still based in the sounds of J-Pop. It’s sort of messy, familiar, joyous all at once. It’s what colorless ultimately wants to be, representing instead missed opportunities and broken promises.
colorless is the story of aspiring model Yuka and aspiring photographer Shu. They enter into something of a romantic relationship after doing a job together, and layers of past traumas and current indiscretions threaten to destroy both of them.
That’s it in a sentence at least, it is sort of a film about youth in love, but we will get to why I feel the need to qualify what it is about with a mitigator. Ever since Yuya Ishii’s The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue lit a fire under the young urban love genre a few years back, I have wanted to believe in there still being a great power to the simple coming of age flick. What The Tokyo Night Sky understood that many, including colorless do not is that we can’t simply treat characters as the result of a series of events in their lives, we also have to treat them with empathy, and see the character as an ongoing process.
Laying my cards on the table, colorless doesn’t treat Yuka with any real respect. It shows how her failings and her weaknesses have led her to where she is, as well as a powerful trauma and constantly being walked over. What it doesn’t do is give her equal footing with Shu. Her own desires are portrayed as an inconvenience, and though the film threatens to examine the circumstances that have created her, that have stripped her of her lust for life, its final trick is to pull that away in an unsatisfying ‘gotcha’ moment.
Shu is not really afforded the same scrutiny, beyond occasionally being laughed at by his bosses. Appearing as a deeply manipulative figure for much of the film, it became hard to go along with any of the film’s more emotional beats that pertain directly to him.
It feels like there could be a kernel of something at the heart of colorless: an infatuation with beauty and artifice that controls and consumes. Yuka is tossed aside by a system that treats her like dirt even as she does everything right, while the less attractive women in the entertainment business are treated with open contempt. To say that colorless portrays this sensitively and effectively is to give it a benefit of the doubt that I am not entirely convinced it deserves.
Indeed, colorless is aesthetically lovely, much like its leads. Even in its ugliest moments, it never shows on the surface, the washed out colour palette at once evoking pain and nostalgia. It’s a visual metaphor for itself: beautiful and facile, with more than a hint of malice.
It’s aspiring to be more though, it’s embracing its messiness, which I like, while not committing to its structure, its characters, respecting any of the women present within it. Both Shu and Yuka follow a recognisable lineage of characters: aloof arty boy, bubbly arty girl with hidden issues. We appreciate that it is a film about young lovers, we can recognise the signs
However, where Tokyo Night Sky offered some deviations that complicated and refreshed the genre, colorless feels vindictive. It’s a film with a gorgeous face and a nasty spirit, with little reason to be as unpleasant as it is, beyond staving off its own boredom. Having sat with it for a day, quite liking it immediately after viewing, it has matured to leave a nasty taste in the mouth.
‘Seventh Heaven’ is everything colorless couldn’t be. But what a reward it is to finish off a competent, yet somewhat unpleasant film with a final blast of euphoria. If you find yourself watching it, not sure if you want to continue, stick with it to the credits, just to feel something, anything.