{"id":2930,"date":"2020-04-11T11:59:22","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T15:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/?p=2930"},"modified":"2020-04-11T11:59:24","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T15:59:24","slug":"his-motorbike-her-island-nobuhiko-obayashi-1986","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2020\/04\/11\/his-motorbike-her-island-nobuhiko-obayashi-1986\/","title":{"rendered":"His Motorbike, Her Island (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere Comes the Rain Again,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Falling on my Head, Like a Memory\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–<\/em>Annie Lennox<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re never really alone. We can feel it on our skin. A presence gently announcing itself or tussling our hair like an older sibling might do. She\u2019s always there, underneath the beating heart of the sun and the soft bed of the sky. Like a human, she\u2019ll shift and evolve, curve and break on the edges of bodies. Looking for the wind becomes less of a quest and closer to a prayer that the Earth is still breathing upon her children. She knows every last one of us, has touched the soul of every child who can feel her, or hear her, just outside the realm of visibility. Even if we\u2019re gone, she\u2019ll still sing, still gust with stories of everyone she met as a natural goddess of Earth. She\u2019ll bend for eternity, but she\u2019ll never break under the weight of all her lost children.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m looking for the wind, and then I\u2019m going to take a nap\u201d<\/em>
–<\/em>Ko  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ko (Riki Takeuchi) drives a motorbike and dreams in monochrome. He wears a leather jacket, a white t-shirt, denim, of course, and brown riding boots. A uniform for the free man. He\u2019s restless, looking for something more than life can offer him, but he\u2019s not the kind of man who would say he needs an anchor in life or something to push his narrative forward. All he needs is a stiff kick, and the loud crack of an engine giving way to the next chapter in his life. Whatever happens will happen, and he\u2019s carefree in that belief. It\u2019s easy to fall for a guy like him, with his abs, cocky smile and his allegiance to the road. A woman could only ever be third place for Ko after his bike and after pavement. She might believe her truest task is convincing him that she\u2019d offer more depth than the unpredictability of whatever may come out of the curve, with the wind by his side, but she\u2019d be wrong. It\u2019s why men give things like bikes she\/her pronouns. Ko\u2019s already married to the wind, and he has a relationship with her that doesn\u2019t require responsibility, only trust, that she\u2019d be behind his back and on his flesh as he blares off into the distance, where only sound would remain for women who\u2019d look on.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miyo (Kiwako Harada) is a surprise coming out of a curve. Ko falls for her instantly in that way characters in movies do. On the surface she\u2019s perfect. She takes pictures, keeps her eyes open to whatever life may throw at her, and listens to what comes ahead. She\u2019s in love with his motorbike, a Kawasaki. She notes that Ko has the same name as his bike, like they\u2019re made for each other, and she wants to ride. She wants to be his. It\u2019d maybe be more truthful to say that she wants what Ko has: the wind. Like the wind, she becomes soft, barely there, but still present in Ko\u2019s memory. She flashes back in when the two wild at heart kids run into each other, as if by fate. And, because this is a movie, the opening title card states as bluntly, they\u2019re pulled toward each other. They\u2019ll remember each other forever, and their time on the island, on the road, will echo into eternity.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi\u2019s insistence to shoot the romantic sequences and the more important moments of the film in monochrome, which bends into colour, functions like memory. We want to remember certain memories as perfect, as cinematic as possible. It doesn\u2019t matter if that\u2019s how they actually happened, because the memory of how we remembered it is definitive. A picture can lie, because it can\u2019t mutate or evolve with time, but memory bends to context and emotion. It can have jump-cuts, moments where music swells, and sequences where the world only belongs to you. The road is kind of like that too. You can soundtrack it to whatever music you\u2019d like in your car or on your bike or in your heart. Each passing town or house or inch of pavement can open up a new chapter in your life. You don\u2019t even have to know where you\u2019re going, because the road will point you in the right direction. When Ko and Miyo start riding motorbikes together they drift apart when one takes a new intersection, but always circle back to one another when the road meets again. They swerve in and out of one another on completely abandoned highways. It may have not happened like that exactly, but film isn\u2019t a place for realism and neither is memory. They dart back and forth between one another like a metaphor for two people truly in love. She was him. He was her. They both lived behind the wind, pulled into one image. Even if life has a way of pulling someone out of perfection and into a back-highway of desolation you can still rest easy knowing that you and perfection will always be back then. In Clint Eastwood\u2019s, A Perfect World (1993), <\/em>there\u2019s a short monologue about cars being time machines. Everything in front of you is the future, and everything in that rear-view mirror is the past. Maybe this is why we make movies about cars, about motorbikes, about love. \u00a0

originally published 06\/27\/2019
patreon<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHere Comes the Rain Again, Falling on my Head, Like a Memory\u201d –Annie Lennox We\u2019re never really alone. We can…<\/p>\n

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