In Okurimonodocumentary filmmaker Laurence Lévesque invites us to follow her mother-in-law, Noriko Oi, a Montrealer of Japanese origin, during a return to her native country. During this trip to Nagasaki, during which she sells the house where she grew up, Noriko Oi revisits her past and the memory of Mitsuko, her mother, who died three decades earlier.
If Mitsuko is absent from this documentary, she takes flesh over the course of this patient and spare work. Let us immediately salute the audacity of this proposal, whose main character is missing, if not liminal. It must be said that Laurence Lévesque is in full control of his subject and manages to give a voice and a body to this discreet character, in this nuanced, subtle and tender documentary. Through intimate scenes, we observe a slow process of mourning taking place, while Noriko Oi discovers letters left by her mother – the ultimate gift (okurimono) — which make him discover Mitsuko from a new angle.
The weight of shame
The intimate and the collective respond to each other in Okurimono. On August 9, 1945, the American army dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which caused nearly 80,000 deaths. Mitsuko is one of the few survivors of the explosion, as the walls of the hospital where she is located resist the assault.
In Japan, the victims of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs have a name: “ Hibakusha “. In the aftermath of the bomb, survivors do not speak of the events. A culture of silence settles around them, and people who survived the bomb are victims of discrimination. Why not ask her mother about this event, asks Noriko Oi? Laurence Lévesque keeps asking the question: do we really know the history of those who gave birth to us?
In the only night sequence, Noriko Oi attends a procession (Spirit Boat Procession), where we pay tribute to the missing by parading boats equipped with lanterns – at the end of the ceremony, these boats are destroyed. It goes without saying that these traditional scenes resonate in a very powerful way in this work which reflects on ways of preserving the memory of the dead.
The settings of this mountainous city, surrounded by the ocean, are absolutely splendid. The cicadas cymbalize, the birds sing, the vegetation blooms in this highly sensual work. Nagasaki appears alive, vibrant and green, in contrast to the images we know of it: gray and smoking scenes of terrifying devastation. If the luminous photo direction (Sébastien Blais) gives off a calm and soaring aspect, the musical composition weighs down the proposition, loading the work with a disturbing thickness. In this sunny and furiously tender film, perhaps we sought to inscribe the heavy memory of the bomb through this musical composition which disturbs the tranquility, which undermines the sweetness of the images.
A tender look
At the end of the documentary, Noriko Oi says, “I hope one day I can leave a legacy like this.” Through the deeply tender gaze that the director casts on her mother-in-law, a mise en abyme is outlined, while a second work of legacy then seems to take place between the filmmaker and her subject. Perhaps, finally, to break the chain of this culture of silence and put words to these traumas, which are inherited from generation to generation.
This documentary reminds us that works that deal with nameless, voiceless characters are sometimes those that say the most about great History. We will have to follow the documentary work of Laurence Lévesque, which once again confirms the relevance of his view of the world in this first feature film.
