Radiance review: Possibly the gentlest of features competition for this year’s Palme d’Or, Naomi Kawase’s latest shows the hidden depths of cinema, combined with the tender tones of an unseen connection between two lost souls.
Radiance review by Paul Heath at the 2017 Festival de Cannes, 2017.
Radiance review
Photography seems to be the loose theme bouncing around the Palais des Festivals on the seventh day of Cannes 2017. Not only does the famous venue host the late director Abbas Kiarostami’s final film 24 Frames as part of its 70th anniversary celebrations on this, the first Tuesday of the festival – a film revolving around segments inspired by separate photographs, but it also plays host to the in-competition Radiance, which features Masatoshi Nagase as a blind former photographer.
“Are there things we fail to understand even though we see them? Are there things we can understand even if we can’t see them?” This of course is a statement that is at the heart of this interesting film from Japan. Radiance‘s story centres on Misako (Ayame Misaki), a young Japanese woman who has an interested job; she writes audio descriptions for motion pictures for the visually impaired. It is at a testing for a forthcoming movie where we first meet her, the young writer surrounded by blind or partially blind participants, all providing feedback to the dialogue she is reading from her notes, will eventually make it on the looped soundtrack for the film. It is at this meeting where she meets Nagase’s Nakmori, who can still see partially but his sight is failing him and fading more by the day. His love of photography is his life, his twin-lensed Rolleiflex his metaphorical beating heart, and he wants nothing more but to still be able to create visuals, hence his enrollment into the program he undertakes to provide feedback for audio description. His bitterness towards his growing disability and harshness towards Misako brings the pair closer together, them both eventually physically venturing to the sunset on which they are stumbling creatively – somewhere where hearts, minds and possibly love may be found once more.
Radiance review
Watching the story unfold in filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s fifth film to be entered into the competition at the Cannes Film Festival is a slow-burning one, the director providing depth to the characters she’s created for this world, one which the central ones are impaired both physically and mentally. Nagase is outstanding as Nakamori, the actor very convincing as the photographer struggling with his demons. Misaki also dominates the screen in every frame she appears in, the 28-year-old-actress irreproachable in conveying emotion without the use of dialogue in many of her scenes.
Kawase’s direction is supreme, but it is her slow-building screenplay which is tender and touching. Its execution is consummate, the emotion heightened by the stunning piano score, something which received a deserving standing ovation during the credits.
Radiance review
Radiance is a beautiful film, gentle in approach but also impactful, a film that lingers in the memory long after the credits roll. A huge contender.
Radiance review by Paul Heath, May 2017
Radiance premieres at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, but is awaiting a UK release.
