Kontora (2019)

While the intrigue of Kontora, Indian director Anshul Chauhan’s Japan-set drama, may dissipate over its too long running time of 145 minutes, the opening does just enough to startle. While cycling her normal route, bored and apathetic teenager Sora (Wan Murai) passes something odd: a man is walking down the road backwards.

He’s seen while Sora’s grandfather, right before his death, unsheathes a box of kit from his days as a pilot during the second world war; especially important among odd trinkets, including his goggles, is a notebook full of sketches which Sora takes possession of and an interest in. The man walking backwards (Hidemasa Mase) at first looks like a cinematographic trick; when it becomes clear, through his crashing into people, that it’s not, the act attains a koan-like simplicity: if you walk backwards you can always see what you’re leaving.

Downside being, you can’t see what’s coming. In this case it’s a car. After a disastrous evening at her uncle’s, which brought many bubbling resentments to the surface after years of being incommunicado, Sora and her father (Takuzo Shimizu) drive home on the main road, and knock the backward walking man right off it. Sora goes about helping him recuperate, eventually letting him stay with her and her father, all the while hostilities with her father’s brother escalate over a potential real estate deal, and Sora investigates her grandfather’s drawings – she wonders what he means when he wrote that he “buried [his] metal arm” in the forest.

Shot in texture-less black and white, Chauhan’s images are pretty on occasion but usually no more than functional in presenting the salient matters of any given scene. More beguiling is an underused score, by Yuma Koda, which has a habit of isolating a sound from within the film’s world and mixing it together with sounds without: the effect is that of a kind of sonic distension.

Sora’s rebelliousness, and her immersion into her grandfather’s diaries, are slightly hazily sketched attributes of her personality, though Wan Murai’s performance of that personality is winning all the same. The conceit of her story wouldn’t be outsized (though the characters would) in one of Yasunari Kawabata’s works of fiction, but as a final, shrug-inducing act will testify, we’re not all that close to such clarity.

Kontora, in an oblique but commendable way, sets out to dramatise an important topic in Japan’s modern history: war trauma. As such, Chauhan’s is a film about the weight of what’s been left unsaid, the toll of the untold story.