Belle (2021)

 

Mamoru Hosoda's own favorite films include A Brighter Summer Day and The Spirit of the Beehive, elegiac coming-of-age stories that use light and long shadows to quietly devastating effects.  One of Hosoda's episodes of the series Ojamajo Doremi lifts shots almost exactly from A Brighter Summer Day to achieve the same thing.  And as I said the last time I discussed this film, Hosoda also admires Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose films are similar in tone and subject matter to Hosoda's other favorites.

To this day, Hosoda has mostly stuck to stories about children or adolescents, though with an increasing emphasis on their family relationships.  While the main character's memory of her late mother is central in Belle, it's his first film in a long time to focus on adolescents left to their own devices, with negligible interference from their families.  That's exactly what many people loved about his 2006 film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, that it showed how teenagers can be awkward, frivolous, and lacking in foresight, but when the time comes, also caring and responsible.  The best scene in Belle illustrates this as well, capturing miscommunication, nervousness, and Suzu's ability to forge new relationships in one two-minute long shot.

Belle is more scattered in its events and subject matter than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  The film is named after "La Belle et la Bête," and contains many allusions to it.  The main character's online persona is named "Bell," the English translation of her name, Suzu.  She ends up entangled with a mysterious person known as "the dragon," who hides out in a castle full of roses.

But for much of the film, her connection to the dragon takes a backseat.  Instead, we see two things: the Suzu's in-person social life, and her anonymous, compartmentalized activities on a social media platform called "U."  Scenes in the real world often feature planimetric compositions and lateral movement of either the characters or the camera.  By contrast, scenes in U show CGI models in free flight around three-dimensional space.  

U was intended to have a "nocturnal" atmosphere.  It contributes to our impression that we're watching a hidden, extraordinary side of the characters' lives.  It also evokes dreams, sites of mental free play without consequences, which nevertheless can reflect the things most important to us.  But it also hardly seems real.

This sharp differentiation between offline and online life is important for Suzu.  The film shows us that she once loved writing music and singing, but after her mother's death, lost the ability to sing without experiencing major distress.  She only manages to sing again upon entering a virtual reality online community, behind the mask of her avatar.  No one knows who she really is, but her music goes viral.

With movies that try to detail how the internet works and how it affects people's behavior, it's fair to ask whether they assume too much.  When I first watched the movie, I was unsure of this question.  Also, other people disliked the movie because they found it incoherent.  They found that its sweeping portrayal of the internet, the decisions Suzu makes in her online life, and the personal issues she faces offline have little to do with each other.

Having rewatched the movie, I don't agree with this, though I think it's fair to say that these elements of the film don't cohere very well with the incredibly corny emotional notes.  The visual division between Suzu's online and offline life creates some anxiety about how reliable the happiness she finds on U really is.  The path the movie takes is toward bringing the two sides of the online-offline double life together.  Suzu's online life can only be what she makes of it.  To Suzu, this means proving that the one thing that gave her happiness after years of depression actually changed her, and wasn't just some pastime.  What this movie gets that Summer Wars did not (though Digimon Adventure: Our War Game did) is the potential danger of this process.