Orphan’s Blues

Among the many particularities that Japanese cinematography treasures, the subgenre of ‘seishun eiga’, the youth film, it hasn’t been the one that has traveled the most out of the local screens, perhaps because of a series of conventions and links with its immediate context that is not perceived as the same clarity in other cultural areas. It’s not the case of the penetrating debut feature of Riho Kudo, a young filmmaker whose Orphan’s Blues narrates, with a surprising tonal balance between restraint and contained violence, the physical and, above all, emotional journey of a group of twenty-somethings in search of a foothold for their precarious existence. Taking as the narrative thread the forgetful Emma, who in some way collects, to question them, some tropes of the ‘seishun eiga’, the fragile protagonist obsessed in reaching the affection of the inaccessible male counterpart, we attend an altarpiece of orphan lives, unaffordable to loneliness or marginalization, represented from solidarity and empathy. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH