In your name

Your Name (d. Makoto Shinkai)

Clearly made with Tohoku/Fukushima in mind, the film is a way of dealing with both the natural and man-made disasters as an engaging fantasy love story. What’s unresolved narratively in the film is what interests me and that’s how the young woman was able to persuade her father, the town mayor, to carry out the evacuation. That scene or the chain of events leading up to the saving of the town’s people isn’t shown, and, for this reason, remains in the realm of mystery, or, worse, fantasy because in reality, they had perished. What the film shows is that even with proper and vital information of impeding disaster, the powers that be, of a small town or the central government in Tokyo, will remain unmoved; and that going against any authority is basically confronting one’s father (or The Father/Nation itself). This is the true heartbreaking lesson of the film. There’s also the ongoing theme of memory in the movie where the main characters keep forgetting each other’s name (and other bits of info) in spite of their best efforts. This slip seems more revealing in that it shows the national tendency to forget, the already mentioned disasters, primarily, but also other moments in the country’s history, like the war and war crimes committed in the name of the nation and its citizens.

#2019 #48