Chizu (Kumi Hyodo) tries to find her path in Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night

REMEMBERING EVERY NIGHT (Subete no yoru wo omoidasu) (Yui Kiyohara, 2022)
Film at Lincoln Center, EBM Film Center (FBT)
144 West Sixty-Fifth St. at Amsterdam Ave.
September 15-21 (two-for-one pricing with Our House)
www.filmlinc.org

Yui Kiyohara’s sophomore feature, Remembering Every Night, is a gentle, tender tale of loss and loneliness, of what can go missing in life.

An offbeat band rehearses in a park. Two children get their shuttlecock stuck in a tree. An elderly man can’t find his way home. An old woman gives a young acquaintance a bag of out-of-season mandarins. Cars travel on small roads and bigger streets.

A student pedals north on a two-way, six-lane thoroughfare as vehicles proceed in the opposite lane, soft, soothing music playing on the soundtrack. When those lanes are empty and the student is a mere blip, a series of cars move in the other direction, following the cyclist, but all in the center lane. The passage is lined on either side by lush green trees; in front, a city looms. It’s a beautiful metaphor for people looking to the past or heading straight into the future, as a group or individuals searching for their own paths as nature holds sway over the modern world.

The deeply poetic and comforting film unfolds over the course of one day, following three single women who live in Tama New Town, a Tokyo satellite city that opened in 1971 as Japan’s largest residential development and currently has a population of two hundred thousand.

Forty-four-year-old Chizu (Kumi Hyodo) is a kimono dresser trying to find a job. Thirty-three-year-old Sanae (Minami Ohba) works as a meter reader. And twenty-two-year-old Natsu (Ai Mikami) is finishing up at university.

Fumi (Guama Uchida) and Natsu (Ai Mikami) recall a friend in Remembering Every Night

Chizu gets a card in the mail announcing that friends have relocated and decides to pay them a visit after stopping off at an employment agency, where she is seeking fulfilling work involving a community component. It’s her birthday, but she has no one to celebrate with; she soon gets lost but doesn’t panic.

On her daily rounds walking around the apartment complexes, Sanae, who carries binoculars with her to look closer at nature, is told by an old woman that an elderly man, Mr. Takada (Tadashi Okujno), has gone missing. The old woman tells Sanae how much better it was years ago, when there’d be lots of parents picking up their kids and plenty of fun parties. “Nowadays, we rarely even see our neighbors. It’s quite sad,” she says.

In a park, Natsu dances by herself to music; in the distance, Chizu playfully mimics her movement, as if she’s dancing with her. Natsu then rides her bicycle to the house where a childhood friend of hers, Dai, used to live. Dai has passed away; Natsu offers Dai’s mother a receipt for photographs Dai took that are ready to be picked up, but the mother says Natsu should have the pictures instead.

Natsu and her best friend, Fumi (Guama Uchida), ride over to an exhibit of ancient figurines and pottery from forty-five hundred years ago that have been excavated from the area where Tama New Town is. Discussing time and memory, Fumi explains, “This area was well populated, wasn’t it?” She adds, “It was a new residential area back then. These artifacts were made by the previous inhabitants. The new people didn’t know that the figurines meant. No writing, no records of anything. Just these clay figurines. Yes, that’s all that’s left of them.” The implications are what will the current inhabitants leave behind, especially as they grow more separate from one another and communicate via cellphones, without handwritten letters and printed photos.

Remembering Every Night moves at the languid pace of life; no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. The three protagonists ride bicycles, take buses, and walk. They occasionally pass each other by without knowing it.

Writer-director Kiyohara, who lived in Tama New Town when she was a child, wrote the film during the pandemic, deciding to explore feelings of separation and isolation and the sudden physical distance between people. She and cinematographer Yukiko Iioka let the camera linger on its subjects, often for a few seconds after the characters have left the scene, making them equal with trees, buildings, and roads. Editor Azusa Yamazaki keeps cuts to a minimum in favor of long shots with relatively rare zooms, pans, and close-ups.

Hyodo, Ohba, and Mikami are wonderful as the three women, who could essentially be the same person at three different stages of life; when they do pass by each other, it’s as if their present is reflecting on their past and future. Their performances contribute to the film’s balance of the elegiac and the celebratory.

The soft, warm score is by Jon no son and ASUNA, the band in the park at the beginning of the film. Their easygoing attitude sets the tone for the narrative; when one member sees that her handheld Casio is missing a key, the drummer eagerly says, “Just play without it,” and she does, with an infectious laugh. They haven’t determined the setlist for their gig the next day and admit that their jam needs help; speaking about the last part of the song, one member says, “It’s missing in action.” The keyboardist says with a smile, “We need a search party for that third line.” Then one woman has to leave to go to work, and another has to go home because a repairman is coming by to fix his air conditioner.

It all serves as a prelude for what’s to come, how humans make do with what’s thrown at them, fix what needs to be fixed, and prosper more as a group than as isolated individuals. “We’ll be fine,” one of the band members says as the camera slowly pans away, gliding past someone exercising their hands on a bench, then focusing on trees and plants as the title comes onscreen and life goes on.

Remembering Every Night opens September 15 at Lincoln Center, which is offering a two-for-one deal with Kiyohara’s first film, 2017’s Our House, which deals with female friendship, a missing father, and parallel lives.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]