[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Spectral Valency: Élise Girard’s 𝑆𝑖𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝐽𝑎𝑝𝑎𝑛” by Oliver Farry

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Élise Girard (director), Sidonie in Japan, 2024. 95 min.

Sidonie Perceval (Isabelle Huppert) is a writer, or at least she once was. She has now decided to come out of her self-enforced retirement to do a promotional tour in Japan, where her best-selling debut novel, now many years in the past, has been translated for the first time. Not that Sidonie appears to relish the prospect—she takes her time getting to Charles de Gaulle Airport and tells the check-in crew that she imagines that boarding has closed. As it happens, her flight to Osaka has been delayed three hours, so she will be going to Japan.

At Kansai International Airport, she is met by her Japanese publisher Kenzo Mizoguchi (Tsuyoshi Ihara—“no relation to the great filmmaker”, as a running joke has it). He speaks French, a remnant of his years studying in Paris as a young man, though, truthfully, Ihara’s French is stilted yet grammatically correct, suggesting it is more a screenwriter’s artifice rather than naturalistic communication in a second language. And, yet, maybe that stiffness is true to Kenzo’s character, as he may well be more than simply the publisher who is resurrecting Sidonie’s career.

Sidonie is disoriented after her first few days in Japan. Initially you sense it might be the familiar fish out of water narrative of Westerners in Japan but her disturbance appears to be supernatural in origin. As she does media interviews and book signings, with the cover of the Japanese edition of her book bearing the image of a much younger avatar of herself, she begins to glimpse her late husband Antoine (August Diehl), whose death in a car crash precipitated her retirement from writing. When she and Kenzo stay in a ryokan on a trip to Kyoto, Antoine appears on the tatami in her room. He says that he has finally got to see her because she is now in Japan, “the land of ghosts”. It’s debatable whether Japan might be considered particularly endowed with phantoms compared to other Asian countries, but as far as imprecisions go, it’s a fairly innocuous one.

Sidonie, reaching a bit of closure, now appears to finally replace the deceased Antoine, at least temporarily, with Kenzo. But is Kenzo really among the living? There are suggestions he may not be, and there is also the suggestion that Sidonie Perceval, like her Arthurian namesake, is in search of something (for the French, in Chrétien de Troyes’s version, it is Parsifal and not Galahad who seeks the Grail), so maybe Kenzo is an interim arrangement (compounding this further is a scene where the famous train tableau from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is reproduced).

^{The famous train tableau from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is reproduced}

Élise Girard’s film takes liberties with the spectral valency of Japan and much of it draws on earlier cinema (Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour is also a clear reference) but Sidonie in Japan is not the Japanese-set catastrophe that Gus van Sant’s The Sea of Trees was. Nor is it as precious and brooding as Lost in Translation, largely because of Huppert’s splendid facility as a comically nonchalant heroine (the fact she is game for Asian-set films, having already collaborated three times with Hong Sang-soo, also lends her credibility). Girard’s film might be slighter than it sets out to be but it is enjoyable enough as far as this sort of thing goes.

How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Spectral Valency: Élise Girard’s Sidonie in Japan.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/12/sidonie-in-japan.