Linda, Linda, Linda / Letting the Sunshine In
First some autobiographical drivel... it's my review and I decide what goes in it! Skip the first three paragraphs if you’re not me.
I’ve been feeling burnt out. It feels good to say it out loud. I’ve thankfully gotten the chance to vocalize this and crystallize what it is that I’m feeling with friends and even strangers over the past week, and for that I am grateful. I think my life has been feeling static. I don’t feel challenged anymore, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything, and things generally feel at a standstill. I think I spent so much of the covid years healing, both physically and emotionally, and it’s allowed me to become extremely high-functioning, for better or for worse. It’s nice to not hit rock-bottom every month… but I feel like that’s thanks to a risk-aversion that flattens the highs, too. It’s a common story, just ask anyone that takes antidepressants (I never have, personally, but it sounds similar). I don’t know what it is that I’m missing.
Lately, though, I’ve been feeling the winds of change blowing. Maybe the fever will break no matter what I do… and this is not me taking myself off the hook and allowing complacency. Rather, I am leaning into strange new experiences and spontaneity, opening myself open to a depth and sincerity of emotion I didn’t realize I was cutting myself from, and seeing where it takes me. After a packed weekend, meeting many new and old people, and baring my thoughts to anyone who will listen, I got more or less the same advice from everyone: fuck off and leave, go somewhere. Something I haven’t done seriously in years, and never alone. I will do this soon, but I’m in the planning stage— again, this is not an excuse. I feel it is inevitable. But in the short term, I decided to take the day off and let the day carry me. On that note, I decided very suddenly to make the trek to the West Village and see an afternoon screening of Linda, Linda, Linda, a film I know nothing about except that everyone seems to think it’s great.
I’ve been disappointed by Japanese films, and indeed a lot of Japanese pop culture that isn’t anime and manga (I know I like cartoons, but the reason why has everything to do with the fact that they’re cartoons). That’s not reflected here, because I don’t log movies that I don’t finish. Anyway, this has been a major reason for my stagnation in my language study. I hit the point where I can effortlessly watch the (not very linguistically complex) stuff I want to without subtitles, and called it a day. It’s hard to describe my problems with this stuff without sounding ignorant and making ignorant generalizations…. but if I had to pick one word to describe what I feel is missing, it’s texture. Contemporary Japanese films, literature, and TV series have a certain, to use the Japanese phrase, 身も蓋もない, quality to them, at least to me. Everything gives itself up at a first glance. I see the “bones” of the production: the hokey acting, the cliche-filled script that resolves itself neatly and explains all its ideas like a cover letter. There’s nothing for me to bite into, nothing transcendental that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s disappointing, because it’s certainly not something I feel with French art — and maybe that’s just because I’m much, much better at French. But that’s no excuse to give up. What if there’s another dimension out there that I just don’t know about?
All this is why I was so relieved to discover that there is at least one truly great, sincere, sentimental, deep, human bit of contemporary Japanese cinema that I love, a movie that can make me laugh and tear up, a movie that feels like a whole lifetime in two hours. There’s someone out there gets it, his name is Nobuhiro Yamashita apparently, and the film is called Linda, Linda Linda!
To come back to the “lifetime in two hours” point, there are tons of movies that feel like they pass by much faster than their runtime. This one was, to me, the opposite. I feel like I have such a deep appreciation for these characters and their lives. On the ride home, I kept thinking that I felt full, in the way you do after a delicious meal or a good night’s sleep. It was such an unusual, physiological sensation I’ve never felt with any film before.
Every character has so much to them. Take, for example, Son, who at first you might think acts strange because of the language barrier, which is, you know, understandable. But, and this is really clever I think, it turns out she’s actually just a bit of an oddball to begin with. Speaking Korean to people who clearly won’t understand it (and yet, in one brilliant scene near the end, Kei seems to have understood what she’s saying perfectly), not understanding social cues (the scene at the karaoke bar), brutally direct, etc, but incredibly honest and endearing, too.
Then there’s Nozomi, who is not even really a major character but still has so much to her. I love the detail that she’s a heavy sleeper who grew up in a large and rambunctious family — the peeks into her home life add so much context to her character. She’s competent too. In one scene, she loses her temper a bit and starts directing the band. Kyoko, you’re too slow, Kei, don’t stop playing every time you miss a note. She’s the glue of the band. You may even notice that she can actually play guitar very well, and nails the chords far before Kei does. Isn’t it perfect that she plays bass, though? Someone has to do it! As a bass player myself, I loved that touch.
Kei seems standoffish and austere, which is why it’s so great to see her extended dream sequence that lets us know that she, too, has her flights of fancy. Her relationship with the loser guitarist ex-boyfriend (I’m editorializing here) is so interesting. Obviously, if you’re an adult, you understand what’s going on here. He’s a bit of a sleazebag. But, and this is not excusing his loser-ness, he’s also not that bad of a guy, you can kind of see why Kei likes him, and in turn this reveals an angle of vulnerability to her that explains a lot. She similarly speaks with some awe and reverence towards her burnout upperclassman who drinks sake on the roof and plays the shit out of some twelve bar blues. Her idols apparently include The Ramones, and it’s probably her that put up the cutouts of Marilyn Manson and Bjork on the clubroom walls. She’s the most passionate of the bunch, and music allows her an outlet that she doesn’t get anywhere else. I’m struggling to put my thoughts down with this character, but in a lot of ways she reminds me the most of myself when I was at this age. Short-tempered, sincere, and a little naive.
And finally there’s Kyoko, who is the first character we see, I think, and clearly is some kind of mediator in the group. And yet, as Son reveals in her monologue, she apparently misses practice a lot. We see it happen once, and it presumably has to do with her crush, who she is seemingly texting the entire movie. I love how ultimately, the story with her crush is never really resolved, as she sheepishly admits she couldn’t bring herself to confess before the climactic performance. And you know what? That’s just how life goes sometimes!
This film is full of “that’s just how life goes sometimes” moments. It’s not afraid to eschew narrative demands in order to explore pockets of humanity. I love the noncommittal teacher (顧問?) who is too afraid to step into the conflict between the students, but clearly still wants to support them in some way. When he stammers trying to offer his sentimental advice to the club via their estranged friend Rinko, she just asks “can I go now?” and he blows his big teacher moment. Despite being subtle, this is close to the funniest scene in the movie for me, up there with the hilariously awkward confession scene which ends in a strangely similar fashion. Anticlimaxes are this film’s calling card, but it’s never done in a winking, “subversive” kind of way. It’s always done in service of a sort of low-key realism, a realism that is not always about treating the small dramas and catastrophes of these characters’ ordinary lives as a serious affair, but rather sometimes about diverting the ostensibly more serious moments into wit and levity.
Another device that this film uses which I love is the shot-no reverse shot. I don’t know if there’s a name for this. Basically, we see the characters reacting to something, or facing something, but we don’t see the object of their perspective. Naoko Yamada actually does a similar thing in a lot of her stuff, and in particular I was reminded of Kimi no Iro, which has a lot of similarities to this movie and must have been inspired by it. My favorite examples include: Son crying when first listening to the Blue Hearts (why? we don’t know — we only see the back of her head and everyone else rushing up to her), and Son monologuing to an empty auditorium (although here, we do eventually cut to the auditorium after a lengthy pause). This is such a clever way of heightening the subjectivity of a scene, even as we are deprived from literally experiencing the same point of view as the subject. The film in general is extremely, uh, democratic? In the way it frames its characters. Again, I never went to film school, just let me cook. My point is, the camera is not bound to one or another character’s perspective. Sometimes it’s in the closet, or fixed in the corner of the room somehow. The result is we feel a world where every character is more or less on equal footing, each capable of their own interiority and particular foibles and worries. Am I overthinking this? Perhaps. But again, it’s my review! By the way, couldn’t figure out where else to put this, but the attention to detail shown in the small glimpses into every character’s life also reminds me of Yamada. If you don’t know, look how much production material there is about the girls in K-On! — it’s insane.
I love how little this film feels the need to explain anything, how much texture is there, how much space for the viewer to come in and think about and inhabit this world. I was so totally absorbed by this film in a way I rarely am. So many small moments that have entire lives in them, so many expressions that convey more than a thousand words could. That’s what film is about! This movie steps aside and lets the characters speak for themselves, and the result is just magical.
The song is perfect, too. The minute you hear it, it'll be stuck in your head. Linda Linda! Linda Linda Linda-a-a!!!
I’m really glad I watched this movie and opened myself up to such an experience. I’d love to find more like this, and finally I have a foothold in Japanese cinema. If I still believed in rating films (I think it's capitalist propaganda now) this would be an easy five, a very special film that I can't wait to watch again. Maybe Japanese Film January next year? We’ll see! If anyone is reading this and has similar recommendations, aside from the rest of Yamashita’s filmography which I will try to work through, please share.