Memorizu

The past and how we memorialize it are central to writer/director Miiku Sakanishi’s tender debut feature, a family drama about a man named Yuta (Tasuku Emoto) assisting his father-in-law Makoto (Issey Ogata of Yi Yi and Silence) at a rural photo studio after the elderly patriarch fractures his leg. It’s meant to be a short stay — Makoto’s cast is set to come off in five to six weeks — but such trips have a habit of feeling longer and more languorous than they truly are. Shot on vivid 16mm by cinematographer Yoichi Kamakari and set in an area that feels like a memory itself, Memorizu is as fleetingly beautiful as the small-but-meaningful moments it enshrines.

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The film is warm and affable from its opening scene, in which Yuta employs various methods to explain to his daughter how long he’ll be gone from Tokyo. Two months is 60 days, but what does that mean to a little girl? It means I’ll be back in 60 sleeps, Yuta explains; if I sleep more, she responds, will you be back sooner? Okay fine, he says, I’ll be back 60 breakfasts from now. Her retort is the same: If I eat more, will you return sooner? It doesn’t work that way, of course, but wouldn’t it be nice if it did?

A rural photography studio on Japan’s third-largest island is about as busy as you’d expect, with a few loyal customers whom Makoto offers far too many discounts to turn much of a profit and the occasional tourist looking to develop their vacation pictures. Silence abounds within its four walls, much of it of the awkward variety: Yuta and Makoto’s relationship is cordial but strained, not because they don’t like each other but because they simply don’t have much to say. It’s not that the older of the two disapproves of his son-in-law; he just doesn’t have anything in common with him. What he does have is a dog, though, and Yuta comes to enjoy walking the adorable Shiba Inu through the hilly, picturesque environs of Kyushu, which are especially scenic in autumn.

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At its core, though, Memorizu is less about recalling the past than preserving the present, whether that be through old-school photography, cellphone videos, or simply having the foresight to savor a moment you know you’ll want to remember at some distant point in the future. Watching it brought to mind another Japanese film, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s classic After Life, in which workers at a way station between this world and the next help the recently departed choose a single memory to bring with them to the afterlife. (Sanaka Hiiragi’s moving 2019 novel The Lantern of Lost Memories has a similar premise: a mystical photo studio people visit after they die where they select a single moment to relive before moving on.) Makoto’s place of work doesn’t offer any such services, alas, but it does help its customers choose what to remember and how for as long as they inhabit this mortal coil.

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Memorizu is as fleetingly beautiful as the small-but-meaningful moments it enshrines.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t help thinking of a devastating scene from Six Feet Under’s as-good-as-you’ve-heard finale in which one of the main characters stops to take a photo and is discouraged by the spirit of a departed family member: “You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone,” he tells her just before one of the greatest montages in television history begins. The line has been endlessly quoted and contextualized in the 20 years since the show ended, with most coalescing around an agreed-upon interpretation: that some things are so brief, so special, that any attempt to stretch them out and hold on to them will only end in disappointment.

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Sakanishi would likely disagree. The videos Yuta and his wife (Shogun’s Moeka Hoshi) exchange have the cumulative effect of a family scrapbook, the kind you can imagine tucking away in a drawer and forgetting about before happening upon it years later and fondly reliving everything contained within. It’s a welcome reprieve from the near-constant stream of movies decrying our phones as instruments of alienation; when used correctly, at least, they’re also a record of our daily lives that many of us will one day cherish. Some of the moments they capture feel poignant as soon as they occur, while others take time to reveal their true significance. Memorizu challenges us to identify the latter in real time so that we might learn to appreciate them as they happen, rather than in hindsight.