Desert of Namibia

Yamanaka finds a balance for her complicated character to navigate her tantrums and tender moments.

What clinches the portrait is the sure-handed direction and Kana’s organic performance of a daunting character.

The film is so welded to its main character’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.

Holds and zooms for hilariously, sometimes painfully long. Your mileage may vary, as the film has a tendency to meander off course, but that is exactly its intention.

A vague reference to mental health problems doesn’t come in enough time to rescue either Kana or the film.

The dissociation is a dominant feature in the film. With handheld camera work and long takes in tiny spaces, Yamanaka expertly captures the intimacy and suffocation that Kana feels.

Whether she’s impulsively throwing herself into a new relationship or staring blankly at a world that no longer registers, Kawai ensures that even in Kana’s stillest moments, there’s something roiling underneath.

Yamanaka, by expertly exploiting imagery and sound, does not only bring the spectator into contact with the void that ails the contemporary subject, but lets him fleetingly experience it or re-discover its presence within himself.

Kawai’s masterful, multilayered performance, which presents Kana more as willful and lost than born bad and raised wrong, both exposes and humanizes her.

The film ends up getting lost, wandering aimlessly like its protagonist. [Full review in Spanish]