NZIFF ’20: TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

2019; written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa; 120 mins

D’you remember that early episode of South Park, Rainforest Schmainforest? It’s basically about how going abroad can suck arse. This new film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a little bit of that. In actual fact, every time you think it’s going to become a bit too tourist-y or a bit xenophobic, the film veers away and becomes a comment on such things. From its very title, To the Ends of the Earth is a film about preconceptions and otherness – without wanting to sound like some woke cunt.

TV presenter, Yoko, is stuck abroad presenting some tourism fluff-piece about Uzbekistan. Having a shit time, alongside director, Yoshioka, cameraman, Iwao, dogsbody, Sasaki and local translator, Temur, she watches the news item go down the toilet as they chase after mysterious fish, eat uncooked local cuisine and (in a desperate attempt for footage) free a pet goat. In-between filming failures and trying to contact her boyfriend, Ryo, back home, Yoko explores the local area alone, under the gaze of just about everybody and often manages to get herself lost in the side streets and more run-down suburbs.

Barring my aborted trip to teach English in Cambodia, I’ve never had the guts to travel to a non-English speaking country because I’m a wuss. The idea of going to any foreign country is a daunting task for some of us, let alone a poorer, less commercial country like Uzbekistan, so where your sympathies lie may depend on your enthusiasm for travel. What I like about the film is that, despite it’s central conceit of feeling and getting lost in a foreign land, it never falls into that trap of treating the un-subtitled locals as folk to be feared. The characters fall into that but the film doesn’t. It’s precisely that which makes them more interesting. You watch Yoko go through a whole gamut of emotions regarding her relationship with the Uzbeks, including the suggestion that she isolates herself too much and therefore gets herself into trouble simply because she is too unworldly and fears everything that isn’t her phone.

That said, we understand full well why Yoko becomes increasingly affected by isolation and loneliness. She is excluded from the crew quite a lot; the boys have their discussions and meetings and leave her alone, to be gawped at by the public, except when they need her. Not in a deliberate or callously unpleasant way, it’s just that they’re not paying attention. Temur tries to be more friendly with her but in the end, her professionalism isn’t really appreciated by the others til late on and so no wonder she wanders off on her own into the unknown. Her street smarts may be lacking but her ability to snap into sunny-happy presenter mode having only just chucked her guts up and while being made to wear some frankly completely dorky get-ups is very impressive.

To the Ends of the Earth is a very interesting film and one can easily see some of the artier connections that have been attached to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, including Tarkovsky although, thankfully not his pacing. In the cinematography, there were plenty of moments which reminded me of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work (and no, not just because Uzbekistan looks a bit like Turkey). Kurosawa shares a keen eye for wide vistas and far more interesting-looking urban areas, albeit with a more joyous tone than Ceylan’s serious, novelistic epics. Woven into this, however, are the occasional formal breakaways, such as switching to a 16:9 frame to view some of the raw footage shot by the crew or a couple of slightly fantastical musical dream sequences, the relevance of which was lost on me. Rather like Martin Eden, although perhaps less successfully, To the Ends of the Earth uses its more self-reflexive moments sparingly and in keeping with the tone. Even the songs just about manage to mesh as Yoko finds oases of solace outside her comfort zone. A lot of the film feels like it may have been done on the fly, or at least rewritten and worked around things they found in Uzbekistan. I could be wrong but – and I mean this in a good way – it does have a feel of a film discovering the country along with the characters.

It’s a film which seems to be about discovery and ignorance and that rarest of instances: a discussion between the two. The fish-out-of-water narrative can drift dangerously toward shit farce but this is more interested in a gently coaxing us out of our shells.