Director – Naoko Yamada – 2024 – Japan – Cert. PG – 101m
*****
A Catholic schoolgirl with synaesthesia inadvertently forms a rock band who find themselves playing a gig at her school – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
That’s the Serenity Prayer, and it opens this remarkable story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school as she prays it to a statue of Mary in the school chapel. A scene of her as a small girl attending the dance class, and scenes of her seeing other pupils in the corridor, are rendered in vivid, blinding colour where bright white light constantly threatens to engulf the pastel shades in which the girl sees. For more on synaesthesia, see A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (Mark Cousins, 2024).
If you were to land in the middle of this film with no context, for a frame, or a scene (drawn animation parlance for a single shot), you could be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with the print, or the colour balance. I am immediately reminded of the reviewer who said of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947) that the film was so visually perfect that it could be shown out of focus and upside down and the audience would still be enraptured by its kinetic abstract colour properties.… Read the rest