It takes some time to catch up to the fact that Fuyuko (Yukino Kishii) isn’t the one describing her own life in “All the Lovers in the Night,” with its occasional bursts of first-person narration clearly emanating someone other than the shy, young woman at its center, but the intriguingly peculiar male baritone (Tori Matsuzaka) to relay her memories reflects a remove that she feels from a humdrum existence. She recently started a new job in Tokyo as a proofreader after growing up outside of the city and working at a far smaller publishing house, with her demanding new boss Hijiri (Misato Morita) also her only friend in the city, complicating their relationship. As she eventually tells someone who pays the compliment that for all she reads, she must be quite knowledgeable, she admits that she retains little from the pages when looking for mistakes to correct, and the description makes her own days feel like pages being turned with little carry-over when she just wants to get through them.
However, there’s far more eagerness to see what’s next in Sode Yukiko’s absorbing adaptation of Mieko Kawakami’s novel in which the painfully introverted Fuyuko gradually starts to open up more to the world around her after a chance encounter with Mitsutsuka (Tadanobu Asano), a physics teacher she begins to forge a relationship with and a possible romance. What looks to be a traditional love story between two strangers instead offers something a bit deeper, not only because Mitsutsuka and Fuyuko bond over profound talk of how light travels, but the air of ambiguity that Yukiko injects throughout as Fuyuko tries to find her place in the world that she’s constantly at odds with. At first, she tries going to a local culture center to fit in, planning to sign up for a poetry course when she embarrasses herself in the hallway by puking from a night of drinking too much and you know that her connection with Mitsutsuka is genuine when the former sees her at her very lowest and still wants to lend a hand, waiting patiently as she sleeps things off in the student lounge and presents her with some water.
Soon, the two take their meetings to a local restaurant where Mitsutsuka spends time away from the high school where he teaches and, at Fuyuko’s behest, starts to describe a world of possibilities scientifically over lunch, handing her the book “Particles of Matter and Light,” a rare piece of literature she can pore over without picking up a pen to mark it up for edits. The transporting nature of the reading material doesn’t only offer a bit of escapism to Fuyuko, but a rather elegant and thematically appropriate opportunity for Yukiko to time travel to observe a formative experience with a high school classmate that made Fuyuko’s preexisting inhibitions all that much more worse and rather than draw tension in whether she will consummate a relationship with Mitsutsuka, who is about 20 years her senior, far more is found in simply feeling comfortable in her own skin, knowing that she can’t go on too much longer without more connection but simply at a loss for meeting anyone halfway.
Kishii, a standout from Sho Miyake’s “Small, Slow But Steady,” is magnetic throughout for as off-putting as Fuyuko believes that she is, conveying well a lack of self-confidence that others only slowly pick up on when its cause is unclear and how much she should actually put herself out there is an open question when Yukiko seamlessly builds in a general feeling, particularly amongst women of her age, that partnerships of any kind are bound to disappoint as Hijiri is known to keep things casual, so as not to weigh herself down, and a former classmate of Fuyuko’s describes being trapped in an unhappy marriage when she returns home for a funeral. These discouragements only seem to reinforce what’s special about her connection with Mitsutsuka, a quality that extends to how an audience feels about what’s unfolding as well when culturally the worth of staying engaged seem to be diminishing by the day. The slightly unusual formal decisions Yukiko makes such as the aforementioned voiceover or unexpected dips into daydreams without much warning end up adding to the feeling that something slightly magical is going on without overemphasizing the point, much as some choices may seem idiosyncratic in the moment, and when “All the Lovers in the Night” keeps engaging, it impressively conveys the tragedy of the alternative.
“All the Lovers in the Night” will screen again on May 18th at Le Cineum Salle 3 at 9:15 am and at the Salle Bazin at 2 pm and May 19th at Le Cineum Screen X.