Casting Blossoms to the Sky and the Long Farewell to Obayashi
Over the past few months I've been watching the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi. The refrain from the various cinephiles I respect is that his films changed their relationship with cinema. This was compelling enough to dig deeper and I can now confirm, thirteen films in, that this is absolutely correct. Working through this man's filmography has felt like a cinematic bildungsroman: my soul has been enriched and my appreciation of film has deepened.
I'm writing about Casting Blossoms to the Sky because it's the first in the final crop of films Obayashi directed in the 2010s, before he died in 2020, that expressly deals with war and pacifism. Obayashi frequently explained that all his films were about war in some sense. The most striking example being that House was about the guilt he felt over surviving Hiroshima when none of his school friends did. These last four films however were explicit rather than allusive. Arriving here after having watched so much of his prior work feels like a culmination of something significant. I've completed the necessary work to fully appreciate his grand ambition, his profound examination of war, its causes and its costs. Pair this with a contemporary moment where America and Israel are collaborating in some of the most diabolical acts of warfare in my life time and I was not prepared for the intensity of my response to this film.
That mix of grief and catharsis might be why I'm struggling with how to summarise Casting Blossoms to the Sky. In principle it concerns a journalist called Reiko who interviews survivors (of wars, of occupations, of earthquakes). Her ex-boyfriend from the distant past Kenichi, now a high school teacher, has invited her to his hometown of Nagaoka to watch a play written by mysterious student of his about the WWII air raids that occurred 75 years prior. He thinks she'll have a professional interest in this as well as the town's history, which also includes a major earthquake that happened in 2005.
However, these are just the contours of the experience. What follows is a film essay (the title card announces) about Nagaoka's people, multiple generations that exist simultaneously, alive or not, and recent and past events that intertwine as the film unfolds. It is a virtuosic fantasia of human experience that rejects linearity in favour for pure sensation, a fireworks display of grief and renewal. I was bewildered and stunned as I watched, and I don't think I've felt such raw emotion watching a film in a long time.
I'm sad to be running out of films by Obayashi, but if these final three are anything approaching Casting Blossoms to the Sky they'll be something that stays with me for a long time.