NAGI NOTES Review

By the third film of our second day at Cannes, we had begun to wonder whether this festival was going to give us something that truly settled into us, something quiet enough to hear. The Electric Kiss was too noisy with competing intention. In Waves was too smooth, too surface. And then we sat down with Nagi Notes, and the festival finally exhaled.

Koji Fukada's film takes place in a rural Japanese town 630 kilometers west of Tokyo, a place so small that everybody knows each other and so quiet that the loudest sound most days is a radio broadcast keeping the peace. Into this stillness arrives Yuri, a divorced architect from the city, sharp bob and upscale coat announcing her as an outsider with every step. She has come to visit Yoriko, her former sister-in-law, a sculptor who stayed behind in the town where she and her brother grew up. The marriage ended. The friendship did not. The film proceeds from that premise with the unhurried intelligence of a director who trusts his audience completely.

Fukada has always been fascinated by how we use other people to map the fractures within ourselves. Here, for once, he lets that process lead somewhere tender rather than devastating.

The heart of the film is the barn where Yoriko sculpts, and the long slow conversations the two women have as Yoriko carves a camphorwood bust of Yuri's face. These scenes are extraordinary in their restraint. Nothing is declared. Everything is felt. Two women in a society that has asked them to be invisible to each other find, in the shared act of looking and being looked at, a language for things that neither could say alone. Takako Matsu as Yoriko does some of the finest work we have seen at this festival, her stillness containing multitudes, her eyes doing the work that most performers would reach for words to accomplish.

Fukada surrounds this central relationship with a web of subplots, a pair of teenage boys learning to draw in Yoriko's art class, a disembodied radio voice holding the community together, the distant percussion of military training exercises and news of war bleeding in from the edges of this seemingly sealed world. Another director might use these elements to contrast the town's peace against the world's violence. Fukada is more precise than that. He understands that the war is not outside the frame. It is inside every person who has been asked to stay small and stay quiet and not ask for more than they have been given.

The film's climax involves three runaway farm cows. It is also one of the most quietly thrilling sequences we have watched at Cannes this year. That is not a contradiction.

There are moments where the film's gentleness risks becoming inertia, where the accumulation of subplots threatens to dilute the central relationship rather than enrich it. Fukada is walking a fine line throughout and occasionally wobbles. But the wobbles are minor and the achievement is real. By the time Nagi Notes reaches its conclusion, a film that seemed to be drifting has revealed itself to have known exactly where it was going the whole time, and the destination carries the force of something earned rather than engineered.

We walked out of the theater into the Cannes afternoon feeling something we had not quite felt yet at this festival: the specific, grateful calm of having been in the presence of a film that understood what it wanted to say and said it without raising its voice. After two days of noise and spectacle and disappointment, that felt like everything.

🍿 SCORE = 91/100