Yoshishige Yoshida's Farewell to the Summer Light is a poetic, sensory experience, a film that serves as a great companion piece to Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour due to its reflective exploration of love, memory, individualism, and companionship. Taking place across Europe, the film documents the spontaneous romance that unfolds between, Kawamura, a Japanese professor touring Europe on holiday, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris who remains scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings of a few decades ago. Yoshishige Yoshida's Farewell to the Summer Light is the type of film that feels like a dream, a hallucinatory exploration into the psyche of two individuals, each of which is struggling to find themselves. The shared connection between these two characters offers simply a window into understanding them as individuals, with Farewell to the Summer Light offering such maturity and vision in this deconstruction of an adulterous romance, one that attempts to understand how these characters reached this exact moment in life, exhibiting how their past experiences and personal experiences have brought them towards each other. Introspective in its examination of love, companionship, memory, and time, Farewell To The Summer Light is an honest film about the concept of love itself, examining how it restricts individualism and eludes simple restrictive definitions, being a concept that transcends time itself. Reality and perception of what love is and what it means are a major component of Farewell to the Summer LIght, with both Naoko & Kawamura's shared perceptions of this undefinable construct being what shapes their spontaneous, yet conflicted romance. Naoko's connection to Kawamura is one of restrained desire, a character who feels indebted to her husband and unwilling to betray him. She views her journey with Kawamura through Europe as a way to reconfirm her commitments and the life she has chosen for herself in Europe, unwilling at first to acknowledge that her sense of connection and attraction for Kawamura stems from how he reminds her of Japan, most specifically pre-war Japan in which she maintains fond memories. Through her turbulent relationship with Kawamura, Naoko slowly begins to reclaim her own sense of happiness and individualism, with Kawamura being a character who forces Naoko to confront her past sorrow while empowering her to reclaim her own definition of love and happiness, one that isn't entirely linked to the safety, comfort, and security which her husband provides. While Naoko is coming from a place of deceptive comfort, Kawamura is a character who is alone and searching for something, with his meaningless search for the phantom cathedral being a symbolic representation of his endless search for love. Naoko is a character who offers him some semblance of companionship and connection, empowering Kawamura as a character to maintain his sense of hope while simultaneously shattering his romanticized version of what love truly means. While Introspective and ambiguous, it's through this relationship that Naoko and Kawamura share that both these characters find some semblance of peace and understanding, with Farewell to the Summer Light exhibiting how companionship can offer an introspective examination into oneself, where self-reflection can lead to personal growth as an individual. It's through their shared experience that perception meets reality, with both Naoko and Kawamura able to free themselves from the preconceived ideals about love forced on them by society, with each character finding their own definition of what it means to truly love. From a visual perspective, Farewell to the Summer Light is striking, with Yoshida's use of visual design perfectly exhibiting the introspective, confused state of his characters, one in which the tug and pull of their spontaneously evolving relationship is expressed in every frame. Early on, the back-and-forth nature of Naoko and Kawamura's budding relationship is expressed visually through disjointed photography and composition that rejects the natural flow of visual storytelling, featuring jarring editing that beautifully illictis the emotional chaos that can exist in a chance encounter where feelings are mixed but the connection is undeniable. Throughout Farewell to the Summer Light, Yoshida's film feels like part travelogue, part introspective romance, with the photography capturing the beauty of the region while simultaneously providing an introspective look at these characters. Europe's ancient ruins and old architecture paired with wide-lensed photography provide a sense of scale to the whole experience, with Naoko and Kawamura's shared connection being powerful and universal while also minuscule when compared to the grand scale of time. Part travelogue, part introspective romance, Yoshida's Farewell To The Summer Light is a transfixing experience, a film that touches on host of profound ideas exploring the relationship and connection between love, memory, and time.
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June 2023
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