Naomi Kawase, Vicky Krieps Film Explores Heart

When the Locarno Film Festival at the end of July unveiled director Naomi Kawase’s (Embracing, The Mourning Forest) new film Yakushima’s Illusion (L’Illusion de Yakushima), starring none other than Vicky Krieps (Corsage, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Hot Milk), as a late addition to its competition lineup, it was considered a surprise and a coup.

Not much was known about the movie, but the involvement of two big names in independent film had industry insiders intrigued.

“Corry, a French coordinator of pediatric heart transplants, is sent to Japan where organ donation remains taboo,” reads a synopsis of the film on the Locarno festival website. “As she fights to save a young boy, her partner Jin, a photographer from Yakushima, suddenly vanishes. He becomes a ‘Johatsu,’ as the Japanese call the 80,000 people who disappear overnight each year. Corry faces a double ordeal: saving a child while coping with the loss of the man she loves.”

As Kawase says in a director’s note: “Through a foreign medical professional’s eyes, this story weaves time and space to reveal post-pandemic shifts in human connection and Japan’s lasting views on life and death passed to future generations.”

Johatsu, or “evaporation,” is the word for Japanese people who disappear voluntarily to escape difficult situations, including financial debt, family conflict, or social pressures. 

Krieps, portraying Corry, stars along with Japan’s Kanichiro as Jin in the French-, Japanese-, and English-language film that is a co-production between France, Japan, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Cinefrance International is handling international sales.

Ahead of the film’s Locarno world premiere on Friday, Kawase and Krieps talked to THR about Yakushima’s Illusion, its inspirations, their collaboration, and presenting a film full of heart to a world full of conflict.

“During COVID, with all the borders being closed and everything, I was really thinking about how people can connect with each other,” Kawase tells THR via a translator. “At the same time, I was thinking about the situations in which people are pulled apart from each other, including this phenomenon of ‘evaporation,’ people disappearing, and then later of heart transplants. In the case of heart transplants, it means that children may die before their parents.” In both cases, Johatsu and heart transplants, “we have a very specific situation in Japan where the families have certain control when deciding the death of these family members,” Kawase explains.

Casting Krieps was a chance to bring in an accomplished actress who can help add an outsider’s view in the movie. “When I was discussing with my French agent how to deal with these very specific conditions in Japan through more objective perspectives, Vicky Krieps‘ name came up in the conversation.”

Krieps was happy to take on the challenge. “Shortly before the film, I felt a calling. Suddenly, Japan was on my mind,” she tells THR. “I don’t know why, and I remember saying to someone, ‘I think I need to go to Japan.’ And probably a week later, I received a call from a French agent that Naomi was looking for an actress, and I went for an audition because I thought I needed to go and meet this woman. I had seen her movies.”

That and the idea of going to Japan “felt like being under a spell or some enchantment,” the actress recalls. “Maybe it’s the culture and the old traditions that are so powerful, and how Japan deals with ghosts.”

Krieps had just lost someone “extremely close to me” before reading the script, so it felt natural to take on the role. “It wasn’t like a casting. We met, and we both knew that we had a similar understanding of death and maybe ghosts and the connection of nature and life and death,” Krieps explains.

Kawase often mixes a documentarian’s eye with fiction for a unique style. She brought the same approach to Yakushima’s Illusion. “In most of my films, I actually have my characters stay and spend some time in the setting of the film,” the filmmaker tells THR. “In this case, Vicky actually stayed in the hospital where we were shooting for a while, and she actually wore the doctor’s garments, had her own office, and she would actually interact with the children there.”

The child actors in the movie did the same. “They would move around with the IV and everything, as if they really were patients in the hospital,” Kawase added. “In this setting, the communication and interaction happened really naturally.” Some real interactions from that period made it into the final film dialogue.

“We were very free to just explore each moment as a moment,” Krieps tells THR. “Some dialogues in a scene would be improvised. For example, one thing I was actually saying to Jin was half improv.”

She even found herself getting lost in the moment and this world. “I do sometimes feel like I talk to trees, and I have in my past and present life been close to grief, or let’s say I grieve in a way that I am very aware of my grief,” Krieps shares. “So sometimes I didn’t know what time it was, and I was just there. I think that’s what makes it so documentary style, in addition to [the fact that] some of the people around us were real doctors. So there was always a mix of both worlds.”

The Japanese title of the movie includes the Japanese word for illusion, but its meaning differs from the English meaning. “It’s something like an illusion that once was, which is a bit different,” Kawase highlights. “It’s even more twisted than the English title, because the Japanese title basically is saying that the illusion is not there, but it also was there. So it’s sort of the combination of this sense of reality, but also imagination that almost feels like dream. And so it really goes back and forth.”

For example, does or did Jin really exist in the real world? “So, it deals with this experience that some things happen, and you don’t really know what is real or not, and it’s almost a paradox in that sense,” emphasizes Kawase. “There are many layers, which are often quite intentionally made ambiguous.”

Krieps chimes in: “Who are we to know what is real and what is not real and what actually existed? Once it’s gone, it all becomes an illusion.”

With its focus on the heart and connections, Yakushima’s Illusion feels like a very timely film. How does Kawase think about that? “Because of the shared experience of COVID, people really desired to connect, have real connections with people,” the filmmaker says. “But what actually has been happening is that there’s more and more division. People are becoming more self-centered, and as a result, excluding the other, otherness. So, through the film, I really want to attempt to connect people who have passed away, who have died and those who are still alive, for example, and children who can only live in a hospital and people who know the world outside of the hospital.”

Concludes Kawase: “The character Corry is a foreign element that comes into this hospital environment. But somehow this foreign element also brings in new perspectives and values, which may, when things are connected, help people go towards something better. So that was sort of the hope that I had.”

And Krieps offered: “The movie has many meanings, and one is about heart, in the sense of open your heart.”

Concluded the star: “I think what society is mostly suffering from is people getting more and more lonely because they cannot connect on a heart level. And progress, technology-wise, is moving super-fast, but progress on the heart level is slowing down, and that creates a big crevasse.”