30/09/2024 - Debuting director Hikaru Uwagawa offers up an apparently disjointed tale in which three stories come one after the other, inviting us to explore concepts such as home, friendship and family

Some people may imagine that a film by a first-timer that aspires to loosely adapt Homer’s The Odyssey, while also drawing on the formal ideas of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, might ooze ambition and pretentiousness. But nothing could be further from the truth. The Ulysses offered by Hikaru Uwagawa, presented in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the 72nd San Sebastián Film Festival, is a modest, transparent film, whose only aspiration seems to be to calmly observe and admire the minute details of the lives of the characters it portrays.

The movie is split into three parts. In the first, we meet a mother and her young son, Russians living in Madrid. Their lives unfold much like the lives of any other family, and during the minutes that Uwagawa’s camera spends depicting them, there is nothing that stands out, no especially dramatic event demanding our attention. The film grants us the freedom to observe the minutiae of their daily lives, and through this, we are able to connect with these characters without having to adopt any kind of position. This is the tenor of the entire film, which in the following two episodes again opts for this kind of non-judgemental observation. First, it does so by focusing its gaze on a young Japanese man strolling around San Sebastián in the company of a gang of female friends. Once again, the day-to-day, the apparently banal, comes into clear focus before our eyes and opens itself up to us so that we feel like just another member of the group. After this, the movie travels to Japan, where another young man gets together with his family to take part in Obon, an annual ceremony held to honour one’s deceased ancestors.

Uwagawa’s offering is radically personal and is absolutely devoid of cliché. The movie takes delight in the spaces it portrays and in the human beings who inhabit them, and it does so calmly, without forcing any dramatic situations on us and without suggesting any obvious discourse that might condition the viewer’s experience. This might all seem quite demanding or perhaps somewhat confusing. Nevertheless, what lingers, what stands out the most in the mix, is a feeling of ethereal sturdiness. The movie finds a way to create thematic, formal and conceptual connections between the episodes so that, as privileged observers, we can be absorbed by the images and sounds, soaking in the sensations and the stimuli that wash over us.

And in the end, we are convinced that what lies behind the Japanese director’s desire to revisit Homer’s classic by leaning on Joyce’s revolutionary vision is nothing more than an exercise in honesty. The fact is that while it might seem haphazard and unintentional on the surface (which it definitely is not), the film raises questions about things such as the search for home, the sensation of belonging, family ties, and feeling a fascination for people and places we do not know, but which could potentially become that very home that we are all looking for so intently. And all of these universal ideas that Uwagawa explores so sensitively and intelligently resonate fully, and to an equal extent, with both Homer’s story and the world we must live in today.

Ulysses was produced by Japan’s Ikoi Films LLC and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, after taking part in the Ikusmira Berriak residency organised by the film school in conjunction with the San Sebastián Film Festival and Tabakalera.

(Translated from Spanish)