A Tokyo nun faces up to ageing in Tiger director Inoue Tsuki's Autumn Adagio. She talks to Edward Lawrenson
As its title suggests, Autumn Adagio (Fuwaku no Adagio), the quietly compelling feature debut of Japanese director Inoue Tsuki, was shot during fall. The season is beautifully evoked by Tsuki, in extended, contemplative shots of her Tokyo exteriors, the trees a gorgeous blaze of autumnal browns and russet reds.
It is in such leafy parks that her lead character, a forty-something Catholic nun called Sister Maria, is frequently found, lost in thought. Revolving around Maria's troubled and confused emotions as she enters middle age, the movie is, Tsuki tells the Daily Tiger, “about facing and accepting aging”. The theme, she continues, matches the “beautiful and sad” feeling of autumn: “I couldn't imagine filming in spring, summer or winter.”
Following Maria's encounters with three male strangers, the film charts her slow emergence from her hitherto cloistered life: playing the piano for a handsome ballet dancer at a local class marks a musical – and possibly sexual – awakening for the shy woman, while she embarks on a more dangerous path through her involvement with a young gardener grieving for his late mother.
Maria is played with great stillness and subtlety by Rei Shibakusa, better known as a musician who has already acted in Tsuki's long short The Woman Who is Beating the Earth (which showed at IFFR 2009). “She turned 40 last year”, Tsuki says, discussing her inspirations for the film. “She’s been living alone, but with her music. She is stoic, and I began to think of how I could use her way of being, and her beauty, for a movie.” Another trigger for the film came when Tsuki was in a crowded Tokyo street: “I saw an old nun crossing the road. We rarely see nuns in Japan, and I was struck by her, as if she came from another place and time. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.”
With many scenes marked by a static, long-take approach, the style is markedly more restrained than in The Woman Who is Beating the Earth. Using the prize money she won for that short at Yubari to finance Autumn Adagio, Tsuki explains the formal austerity on aesthetic rather than economic grounds: “It was important to shoot it in this dry and realistic way because the story is not melodramatic or fantastic. I wanted to depict a slice of life.”
Nonetheless, the low budget made for a tough shoot. “The crew almost had no time even to eat”, she recalls. Still, she took heart from the team spirit of her crew: “One day, it didn’t stop raining which meant we couldn’t continue shooting. So we all went to a café to wait for the bad weather to stop. When I found that all the crew were having a cup of tea, relaxing and having a pleasant chat together it gave me a huge relief. They were working so hard for me with few guarantees so I was feeling guilty. But when I saw them enjoying themselves, despite the difficulties of the shoot, I felt happy and positive about the film.”
More on Autumn Adagio.