, who may someday play a likable character, but today is not that day), Yoko is nothing if not plucky, gamely wading about waist-deep in search of a possibly mythical fish; eating an undercooked local delicacy and pretending it’s delicious; and riding for take after take on a rickety-looking fun-fair ride until she throws up.
The experienced cameraman Iwao and handsome interpreter Temur are more sympathetic, but Yoko is often alone, and it’s on her forays into the local area, armed only with a map and a few words of broken English, that Kurosawa’s close, obviously firsthand observations about the tourist experience are most fully if subtly expressed. The vague terror of riding on a bus and not knowing which stop is yours. The actual terror of a run-in with the authorities when you’re unwittingly trespassing.
The view presented of Uzbekistan is, refreshingly, less exotic than everyday — DP Akiko Ashizawa’s shot making occasionally captures pretty vistas and colorful ethnic traditions but more often deals in the backyards and street grit of humdrum life. And if anything, even more trenchant is the critique of the synthetic perkiness of Japanese TV — all cutesy shrugs and addressed-to-camera incidents that bear no real relation to the storied lives being lived in this part of the world.
Yoko’s apology to him is sincere, and in the airy yet intricate plotting of Kurosawa’s screenplay, also liberating; another level on which “To the Ends of the Earth” works is as a character portrait of this likable, resourceful but slightly misdirected young woman as she comes to understand her own ambitions a little better.
“To the Ends of the Earth” is not flawless — for one thing, it’s questionable whether a journey to as mild a shore as this one needs two hours to complete. But its rhythm is deceptive — the gentle currents are Kurosawa’s attention sluicing across the surface of the film like developer fluid, under which all the colors, dark and light, of the fulfilling but also contradictory experience of world travel come up true and sharp.
Btw, why are film reviews’ credits not visible in the mobile view? Not a good look.
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