Ryosuke Hashiguchi's Like Grains of Sand is a poignant and provocative coming-of-age tale which formally manages an impressive amalgamation of classicalist aesthetic sensibilities with that of the more rebellious/ revolutionary modes of the Japanese new wave which signaled angst towards the normative social constructions. A coming of age story which places sensuality and affect above narrative rigor, Like Grains of Sand isn't interested in character development in the traditional sense, yet through its evocation on this spectific temporal space of adolescense - one in which one's identity is still formally tenuous - the film delivers an incisive portrait of the complexities of youth and the socially performative modes one partakes in for the sake of assimilation into normative society. A poignant and penetrating evocation of youth, identity, and repression, detailing how the later often calcifies itself to the psyche due to the performative nature of social interactions under the collective cultural weight of traditionalism, Like Grains of Sand is tender yet fiercely counter-cultural, ultimately being an affront to false-notions of sincerity, recognizing through its formal construction that collective salvation as a society comes when empathy and sincerity are elevated over empty-notions of politeness or acceptance, which in turn ultimately lead to repression
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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