Liz and the Blue Bird (2018)

This is an edited version of a post I wrote a few years ago here.  I still stand by most of that post, but after watching Naoko Yamada's episode of Modern Love Tokyo, I found I had more to say about this film, and felt a sort of update was in order.

Mizore Yoroizuka and Nozomi Kasaki both belong to the Kitauji High School Concert Band.  Mizore plays oboe, and Nozomi plays the flute.  The film is a spin-off of a TV series called Sound! Euphonium, but there’s no need to have seen the series to appreciate the film. The film is almost entirely self-contained.  It’s a very private affair, containing only a few characters besides Mizore and Nozomi who really matter.  Mizore is extremely withdrawn: she often speaks in a whisper and hesitates to socialize with anyone other than Nozomi.  Nozomi is more sociable.

With the concert band, they’re practicing a piece of music called “Liz and the Blue Bird,” based on a fairy tale about a lonely woman named Liz who forms a relationship with a bluebird that took on human form. At the end of the story, Liz allows the bluebird to fly away and leave her. Nozomi says she thinks this is a sad ending and would prefer one where the bird returned. Mizore doesn’t understand the ending at all: she can’t comprehend why Liz would let the bluebird go if she loved her. 

The point is obvious: the love between Liz and the bluebird is meant to reflect the love between Mizore and Nozomi. Many of Mizore’s lines in the movie state this outright.  Usually, we prefer films to show rather than tell, and Liz and the Blue Bird tells us a great deal.  The characters' thoughts are spelled out for us in narration and dialogue.  

But this is hardly a problem.  Knowing what the characters are dealing with complements what the movie shows us in a way that builds tension: we know what Mizore is thinking, but we don’t know how she’s going to manage to communicate it, or how it might change when she reacts to other people.  This tension is a huge part of what makes the film’s climax as moving as it is.  It’s made possible by how much the film ties us down to Mizore's physical and mental personal space.

The imprisoning quality of this film, and how it fits into a structure of tension and release, is one reason several viewers compare this film's style to that of Chantal Akerman.  Akerman does come to mind at many points in this, especially in how stuck the film is to one location.  But Akerman's camera almost always remains distant.  With Yamada, the "camera" is often so close to the characters we can't see their whole bodies or even their whole faces.  That is largely how this film portrays Mizore.  We see just her feet, or just her hands behind her back, as she fidgets uncomfortably when people ask her questions.  We see her habit of playing with her hair.  We occasionally see Nozomi this way too, from so close up that the frame cuts off most of her features.  While we don’t spend as much time with her private feelings as we do with Mizore’s, Nozomi’s perspective proves extremely important to what the film is doing.

We also see just Mizore's eyes as she impassively observes Nozomi and the other band members—she looks toward the outside of the space in which the film situates us.  The way Yamada's films tend to show only fragments of people's bodies at a time not only stick us within their personal space but have us peer out at something from a place of seclusion or hiding.  In this her style resembles Wong Kar-Wai's as well as than Akerman's, if you ask me.  With Mizore, this has a double effect: we see many things about her without being able to tell if anyone else can see it, and we look out into a world that doesn't seem to respond.

When the camera sees directly through Nozomi's eyes in the climax, she looks at Mizore.  There are so many layers to this moment.  We are freed from Mizore's personal space.  We finally know that somebody sees her.  We see her as active, intervening in the world.  And she looks us directly in the eye. 

The color scheme of this scene, tinted by the light of a golden sunset pouring through the windows, is another way the film varies on itself.  For most of the film, we see a fairly limited range of colors, those of the school’s interior and the students’ identical uniforms.  We remain in the school and almost never see an exterior space.  The departure from this at the end is such a simple trick, but it makes all the difference.

The school stands in contrast to the several fantasy sequences depicting the fairy tale world of Liz and the bluebird.  The bluebird’s hair permanently looks swept up, as if by the wind.  When her feet leave the ground or her clothing billows, it takes just a little longer than you expect for them to come back down.  Her presence generates a sense of freedom and lightness that we don’t find in the scenes that take place in reality.  The fantasy also features a variety of colors in flowers, fruits, animals, and clothing, and we get to see outdoor spaces.  

Kensuke Ushio's soundtrack is distinctive.  It doesn’t sound like that of any other film I've seen.  The score often sounds as though it’s casually building up to something, like a band preparing for practice.  There’s diegetic music too: the song Mizore and Nozomi perform for the concert band is a pensive-sounding piece meant to represent the parting of Liz and the bluebird.  If you compare the final performance of this song to the ones earlier in the film, Nozomi's flute playing has a newfound delicacy—it’s not until the sound of this scene, and its cutting to Nozomi looking at Mizore, that we fully understand what the song's emotional content is meant to be.

With some exceptions like The Heike Story and the K-On! movie, the stories Yamada focuses on in her work resemble this one: simple tales about high schoolers wanting but hesitating to reach out to someone.  They would be sentimental, and to an extent they still are, if not for the austerity she brings to them.  Like in Nobuhiro Yamashita's 2005 film Linda Linda Linda, youth is an indeterminate window of opportunity to explore and gather raw materials for the imagination to work with for the rest of your life.  But for Yamada, the opportunity can be limited by the characters serious doubts about what they can rightly ask of each other.  

Even so, on top of how mixed and unexpected her stylistic techniques are, her work is also characterized by retro needle drops and occasional references to other films; the most fitting reference in this film is Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  The drive to explore, and maybe even a promise that the chance to explore will last longer than you think, is evoked in her movies by her eclecticism.