Release Date – TBC, Cert – TBC, Run-time – 1 hour 42 minutes, Director – Janus Victoria
After the death of a neighbour, Yoji (Lily Franky) leaves his life behind and heads to the Philippines, where he believes noone is truly lonely.
“So, in the Philippines you’re never alone?” asks Yoji (Lily Franky), a sense that this neighbouring country is a completely different far off land simply because of this fact. After losing his friend and neighbour he decides to depart his isolated life in Japan to spend time in the Philippines.
Writer-director Janus Victoria quietly follows Yoji as he wonders through the streets and starts to have conversations with those he comes across. Finding a small sort-of-community in the places he ventures. He undoubtedly spends his time wandering and the film in turn has a similar feeling to its pacing and structure. It’s certainly intentional, but still feels like general wandering. I sat watching, willing the film and Yoji on in his search to lessen his isolation, but at the same time wanting to film to ever so slightly pick up and show a bit more. To just be that bit better. Especially once the different stages of the central character’s journey become noticeable.
In the earlier stages we see more of his home life than I had expected from the brief plot description I’d seen beforehand, which somewhat implied a different kind of film – although one that we get more in the final half hour where indeed things feel like they’ve been taken from a different film. In the opening stages, however, there’s a more close-up look at things. The camera leans into Franky’s eyes as he truly gets across the loneliness of his character. It’s his performance that truly gets these feelings across and does so rather effectively in these quieter moments that focus on this point, and his turn before gradually stretching into something different the more the film gets towards the closing stages. Leaving me to wish that, while what I was seeing was still fine, that it would get back onto that more intimate track with the lead than the wider environment he found himself floating in, and into.
A film with clear stages, where the opening ones that focus on the isolation of the lead character and the best and most intimate, before things get somewhat lost in the less quiet Philippine streets where the tone shifts into that of a different film.
Just A Little Bit Random 