Director: Kouhei Nagamune
Writer: Kouhei Nagamune
Cast: Yuto Nakayama, Sari Goto
Running time: 24mins
Kouhei Nagamune has a wonderful camera at his disposal for Lelaina – something which no doubt burned through a substantial portion of the ¥400,000 (€2,500) budget. Sadly, for the remarkable depth and definition its lens can pick out, however, all the machine’s finest features are undermined by the characteristically lifeless, washed-out colour grading that has become fashionable in mainstream US cinema.
Scenes which might have buzzed with neon energy, or emphasised the creeping gloom surrounding the lives of Lelaina’s characters, instead take on all the intensity and appeal of over-boiled cabbage. Somehow, though, Nagamune manages to produce a story that is just as insipid as his visuals.
Yuto Nakayama is Mikio, a floppy-haired musician, playing guitar in an aspiring indy rock band, somewhere in Japan. Just as you wonder whether his life could get any more exciting or original than that, into his life stumbles Lelaina (Sari Goto), a manic pixie dream girl on steroids. Having met briefly at a party, Mikio is so utterly captivated by her that he turns up at the bar Lelaina works at the next day – and she proceeds to get him paralytically drunk.
As the days/weeks/months begin to blur together, we are treated to a series of ‘chance encounters’ where one of the toxic pair shows up unexpectedly in the other’s life, despite their conversations uniquely revolving around how much they can drink. How they know to find each other – or indeed, why – are left largely to our imaginations, in a way that threatens to be interesting initially. The doe-eyed Mikio staggering after a woman he knows literally nothing feels conspicuously like he is being set up. As a distinctly mediocre man whose assumptions that his identikit personality must inherently be what is of interest to apparently the most beautiful and vibrant woman he has ever met, his lazy patriarchal assumptions are ripe for exploitation for someone with hidden depths, like Lelaina.
As much as the film’s title might hint at this being her story, though, Lelaina turns out to be every bit as one-dimensional as Mikio. To explore that further, I will be talking about the film’s big reveal – so please, if you plan to see Lelaina and want to avoid spoilers, leave this review here.
Rather than offering up an alternative world-view, through which she and the audience can skewer the mild chauvinism of Mikio, Lelaina becomes a pitiable object, which reinforces his most tedious inclinations. Fuelling the traits that make her so irresistible to Mikio is not some understanding of his ideological weak spots, or some unspoken desire to prove perceptions of her wrong – they are not performative, they are real, and inspired by a downward spiral that has led to substance abuse and sex work.
Neither of these themes is explored from Lelaina’s point of view, either. There is no story of how things came to this, or even a question of how she feels about any of it. This is all about Mikio, and his (unfounded) feelings of betrayal – that someone he was never actually in a relationship with didn’t tell him about aspects of her life that he never asked her about – and how this finally acts as a kick up the backside, so he can concentrate on being the best version of Mikio that he can be.
A large amount of time passes before the final scene – something which Nagamune does a poor job of communicating, leaving us wondering why two characters who seem to have seen each other last week now hardly recognise one another. Both individuals seem to have moved on with their lives for the better, though again, only one of them gets to make that explicit (no prizes for guessing which).
In these final moments, Nagamune again flirts with delivering something more interesting: Mikio, despite his apparent success (what according to the submission notes, is a decade after their last meeting), cannot accept that Lelaina (an alias, it turns out) has also moved on. He can only stand slack jawed at a distance, repeating an irrelevant name to someone, attempting to mortify its former owner – to confine her to his own dead ideas.
Unfortunately, everything in the power of the framing suggests that the extent he appears pathetic here is coincidental. There is only room in the frame for his emotion here – rather than Lelaina/Shoko’s response to Mikio’s complete inability to accept her for who she is. His insistence that she be put back into that box of either being pitied or saved (or abandoned, as he did) would be an extremely disturbing one – and in the few moments where she is allowed to emote in the film, Sari Goto shows she has the talent to convey that. But that isn’t the film we have in front of us.
Lelaina is not a bad film. The plot is uninspired and lacks self-awareness, but the two lead actors have bags of talent, and manage to carry us through the story, such as it is. Still, the film’s pale, clammy visuals and one-note gender tropes speak to a desire to ape US relationship dramas, without a desire to build upon or dissect that genre. That might work when it comes to proving the director is a ‘safe pair of hands’ who can helm one of those productions, and handle a substantially larger budget than he did here, but it does little to show he can innovate old clichés, or appeal to new audiences.