Tsuma Musume Haha

How are Japanese men coping since women disappeared? A fictional premise tacitly undergirds Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita’s severalyear-long documenting of modernday love relationships. If such a disconcerting speculation exists, it is because several phenomena are there to substantiate it. First, of course, the sincere love that humans give – everywhere in the world but very markedly in Japan – to human representations: inanimate objects (love dolls, dakimakura), virtual avatars (digital popstars, video game characters) or body costumes (cosplay, kigurumi, zentai). Then there is also a diffuse concern about the future: where can desire find a sound anchor in a Japan struck by natural disasters, its economic and social structures shaken, haunted by the decline or even disappearance of its population? Caustic yet comic, extravagant but never ironic, the film of Kinoshita and Della Negra invents a new documentary form, a joyful counterbalance created out of all the fictions able to repopulate a disquieting and vibrant reality.

Antoine Thirion