THE STORY – Fuyuko lives quietly, working as a freelance proofreader, her days largely free of contact with others except for occasional outings with an outgoing colleague. Accustomed to solitude, she moves through her days without expectation. Her only personal ritual is walking alone through the city at midnight on her birthday. A subtle shift begins when she meets Mitsutsuka, a reserved high school physics teacher, at a local culture center. Drawn to his gentle manner and his words—”Next time, let’s talk about light”— Fuyuko begins meeting him regularly at a café. As their encounters slowly accumulate, a fragile sense of connection takes shape. Yet both carry things they do not easily reveal.
THE CAST – Yukino Kishii, Tomo Nakai, Tadanobu Asano, Misato Morita & Mai Fukagawa
THE TEAM – Yukiko Sode (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 139 Minutes
The year is 2006. After releasing three albums in her already established music career, Japanese writer and poet Mieko Kawakami spontaneously changes her artistic practice. Transitioning to the literary world, Kawakami starts a blog while submitting drafts to potential publishers. At its peak, her website received over 200,000 hits per day. Quickly adapting to her new career and rising fame, she would publish various novellas and poems that would later garner critical acclaim. Her most well-known work to date is “All The Lovers in the Night”, which was first published in the Japanese literary magazine “Gunzo” in 2011. Translated into over eighteen languages, Kawakami’s universal text speaks to perceptions of love in contemporary Japanese society. Through a feminist lens, the novel later caught the attention of movie producers, who sought to translate Kawakami’s intimate story onto the silver screen.
Unsurprisingly, it was inevitable for Japanese director Yukiko Sode to accept the task of adapting Kawakami’s lauded text into cinematic form. Best known for her feature “Aristocrats”, which competed in Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition, Sode’s existing oeuvre shares plenty of narrative and thematic similarities with Kawakami’s writing. This isn’t the first time Sode has tackled the topic of modern love, as “Aristocrats” dissects the polarities of class, desire, and 21st-century dating through the perspectives of two women. This time around, her patient and melancholic mise-en-scène illuminates her acclaimed source material through unhurried pacing.
“All The Lovers In The Night” takes its sweet time establishing the quotidian rituals of its introverted protagonist. Succumbing to the solitude of its timid lead, the film follows the daily routines and philosophies of freelance proofreader Fuyuko. The tricenarian has yet to experience her first love. She doesn’t have any hobbies, and her friend group is nonexistent. Slowly building upon her tragic character through sparse flashbacks, Sode patiently unveils her protagonist’s traumatic past before inciting her romantic subplot. Refusing to sugarcoat the adversity Fuyuko faces daily, “All The Lovers In The Night” primarily spotlights the protagonist’s social awkwardness and alcohol dependency without passing judgment. The authentic portrait offers a grounded portrayal of substance addiction without relishing in her character’s misery.
Actress Yukino Kishii portrays Fuyuko through reserved mannerisms and fragile oration. Exploring her character’s interiority within the confines of her laborious, repetitive occupation, Kishii finds rewarding subtlety in the mundanity of her daily tasks. Kishii’s vocal cadence conveys her character’s nervousness and traumatic past, empathetically bringing Kawakami’s relatable text to life in the process. Without the need for overwritten dialogue, Sode unveils her protagonist’s perspective through the quietude of Fuyuko’s observations. In her protagonist’s silence, the film utilizes diegetic soundspaces to draw attention to her isolation.
As Fuyuko slowly broadens her cultural horizons, reclaiming her agency through her intoxicated extroversion, “All The Lovers In The Night” begins to diverge into predictable narrative territory. When her day-drinking escapade backfires, she meets the kind-hearted Mitsutsuka, a psychic teacher who spontaneously crosses paths with the disoriented Fuyuko. By pure chance, they find themselves casually talking over drinks, reuniting weekly at a local eatery. Within these intimate conversations, Sode’s adaptation begins to sour. Bludgeoning its viewer with tiresome physics jargon that regresses into an obvious metaphor on the characters’ mutual desires, the tacky dialogue breaks the immersion of its grounded storytelling.
If anything, Sode’s meager attempts at building romantic tension through her on-the-nose text transitions into wannabe Naomi Kawase territory. While Sode attempts to formally express the implementation of scientific hullabaloo through the incorporation of 16mm cinematography, the film’s anchoring metaphor is too vague and broad to make an emotional impact. By circuitously repeating its scientific analogies on light refraction and interconnectedness, the film’s cinematic treatment bores its audience through amateurish screen treatment. In the process, the intentionality of shooting on celluloid becomes lost in its own confounding obviousness. At least on an aesthetic level, “All The Lovers In The Night” visually resonates through its warm color palette and vivid representation of Tokyo city life.
While the film admirably attempts to adapt Kawakami’s seminal novel, Sode’s treatment of the original text’s literary devices fails to capture the protagonist’s growing desires on her unlikely journey. While Yukino Kishii delivers an impactful lead performance, the film swiftly backtracks with a predictable formula that loses its thematic impact. Despite its admirably feminist intentions, “All The Lovers in the Night” diminishes its gravitas the moment its romantic plot begins to spark. Sode’s follow-up to “Aristocrats” safely adapts Kawakami’s beloved novel within her comfort zone. In the process, the film fails to break new ground for the established filmmaker, reiterating the same thematic and formal observations found in her previous work.
