Noboru Nakamura’s film needs to be counted among the classics of Japanese cinema…
If one were to ask a group of people to define love and desire, many people would struggle to separate the one from the other. Yet, if one were to take the place in the psychoanalyst’s chair, one would, after some time, be able to discern that love and desire, despite sharing some similarities, function differently and often quite antagonistic.
Luckily, with Noboru Nakamura’s adaptation of Kyoka Ota’s novel, one only needs to sit before one’s screen to see the blending state of love and desire as well as the destructive finality of desire beyond the grasp of love’s embrace. Shape of Night explores this clash between love and desire by following the subjective path of Yoshie (Miyuki Kawano), a prostitute who finds herself unable to choose between her costumer Fujii (Keisuke Sonoi), who desire to rescue her, and her yakuza-lover Eiji Kitami (Mikijiro Hira), who forced her into prostitution many years ago.
It would, in fact, not be wrong to describe Shape Of Night as a tragedy of hysterical desire. While the narrative vividly touches upon the ravishing impact of sexual violence and of the societal-imbedded condemnation of prostitution on the subjectivity of women, Nakamura mainly aims to trace out the tragical effects of the lengths certain female subjects are willing to go to protect or repair the pristine image of their beloved.
Yet, before these tragic effects unfold, Nakamura introduces the function of the hostess in a bar to the spectator. The way Yoshie interacts with the male customers leaves no doubt that the role of a hostess is ‘erotic’ in nature – a game of seduction without physical sex as its primary aim. It is by stroking the phallically structured ego of the male costumer and satisfy his desire to feel desired with charming expressions and playful signifiers that the hostess ensnares his dumb desire and keeps him consuming.
Yet, what is important in this game of seduction is that the hostess does not bring her own desire into play. If a hostess falls in love with any of her male costumers, she will not only struggle to manipulate the phallic phantasy of her costumers to keep him consuming, but also make herself vulnerable to acts of exploitation and manipulation. It is, in fact, by hoping that her subjective lack will be cancelled out by the future gift of the male phallus – a gift no man can give – that the female subject throws herself into a position of radical dependence. This is, in other words, love’s trap.
The unexperienced Yoshie, of course, fails to protect herself from spark of desirability that adorns Eiji Kitami’s appearance and falls in love with him. Sadly, not long after they get sexually involved with each other, Eiji starts demanding money from her to pay off his gambling debts. Yoshie, enamoured with him and eager to receive signs of his love, cannot but comply with his wishes.
Upon reading the previous paragraph, the reader will surely have noticed a rather strange contradiction. How can Eiji, who puts the image of phallic desirability into question by confessing his debts and failures, maintain this image? In short, because his failures call upon Yoshie’s hysterical desire. Yoshie’s dependence on Eiji does not render her deaf for his financial failure, but compels her to repair his phallic status. As she needs him in his phallic state to keep her own desire going, she will, notwithstanding some hesitations and dramatic refusals, erase his cracks and reinstate his phallic shine.
Yet, when Eiji asks her to wander the streets to attract customers and give all her money to the syndicate, she radically refuses and runs away. She is not willing to fulfill the demand to exploit herself; she is not willing to grant him this radical sign of her love; she will not reduce herself to a sexual object to erase his phallic lack and stay within the field of his phallic desire. The main reason why she refuses is because Eiji’s demand radically complicates Yoshie’s image of a romantic relationship, as defined by sexual exclusivity. The act of prostitution is, furthermore, a threat to the very dynamic between lover and beloved, between desiring and being desired – it slowly consumes love.
Of course, Yoshie’s refusal introduces a riddle within the narrative, one that structures the further unfolding of the narrative. How did Yoshie, despite her radical refusal, end up as a streetwalker? Without spoiling too much, we can reveal that the tragic and shocking turns etch out the destructive finality that marks desire as such.
Besides revealing the tragical dimension of hysterical desire, Shape of Night also explores how suffocating and destructive a patriarchal hierarchal system can be for a male subject. Entrapped within such a trapped system, one is constantly forced to prove one’s phallic worth (e.g. by bringing in money). For some men, who lack the drive to emerge as phallic within the societal field and, thus, shy away from the path of brute violence, one of the only ways to appease the demands of the criminal Other is to exploit one’s lover’s love and desire and turn her body into the sexual object that, by being ravished, momentarily cancels out one’s structural failure.
The composition of Shape Of Night is stylish and elegant. Nakamura’s thoughtfully balances restraint dynamic long takes, fast concatenations of static shots, and interesting shot-compositions to give his narrative an engaging visual rhythm.
The care and thought that went into the composition is already evident in the opening sequence of the narrative. By inserting some close-ups of Yoshie’s hand, neck, and leg Nakamura makes the spectator’s gaze fleetingly coincide with Fujii’s male gaze. By creating such identificatory moment, he puts the spectator into contact with Fuji’s desire, Yoshie’s desirability, as well as the subtle way she seduces the male gaze and enflames his sexual desire.
The darkish lightning design and the use of more vibrant colours, like neon, give the visual fabric a noirish feeling. These noirish accents, beyond reverberating the crudeness of the Yakuza, elevates the visual fabric by offering subtle decorations and creating elegant highlights within the visual frame. The colour and lightning-design, furthermore, allows Nakamura to deliver more elegant visual compositions by letting him emphasize the compositional lines that structure the composition and highlight the play of light and shadow on the object-in-focus (e.g. the moving face, the moving body, the character(s) as such, …etc.).
The engaging visuals are accompanied by a combination of jazzy and classical musical accompaniment, diegetic as well as non-diegetic. Yet, what stands out in the aural dimension is not the tunes as such but the way Nakamura manipulates music and sounds throughout the narrative. By thoughtfully utilizing the dimension of sound, he creates various evocative moments (e.g. the sudden dip in the music’s volume echoes Yoshie’s disinterest in Fujii‘s story) and allows a sense of dread to infiltrate the narrative’s atmosphere (e.g. when Yoshie sees yakuza-like types wandering around her parental home).
Beyond all the visual and aural elegance, it is Miyuki Kuwano who steals the show and gives the themes of the narrative their power to touch the spectator. It is her performance that enables the spectator to grasp the subjective effect of the decoupling of love and desire, of the destructivity finality of desire when the decoration of love is stripped off.
Noboru Nakamura’s Shape of Night offers an incredibly emotionally moving exploration of the destructive finality of the desire of the hysteric. The mesmerizing visual composition as well as the impressive performance by Miyuki Kuwano ensure that this filmic narrative needs to be counted among the classics of Japanese cinema.