‘And So I’m At A Loss’: Tokyo Review

Dir/scr: Daisuke Miura. Japan. 2022. 122mins

Part-time in his job, in a failing Tokyo bar, and part-time in the rest of his life, with a girlfriend he takes for granted and family he prefers to ignore, Yuichi (Taisuke Fujigaya) is drifting aimlessly through his twenties. This wry character study of a young man paralysed by a crippling combination of indecision, discomfort and a ruinous lack of self worth is adapted by director Daisuke Miura from his own play; Fujigaya reprises the role that he first played on stage. It’s a stylish, frequently amusing portrait of a hopeless failure who, over the course of two hours, finally redeems himself somewhat in the eyes of his loved ones and, to a certain extent, the audience.

Fujigawa brings a disarmingly gauche quality to the character

This is not the first time that Miura has used his own theatre work as the basis for a film: previously he adapted his play, Love’s Whirlpool, which won the Kishida Prize for Drama, into a feature film, which he also directed; his other pictures include Someone (2016) and Call Boy (2018). And So I’m At A Loss takes a central character who is unusually passive – and slightly infuriating – and creates drama from the fact that he goes to such desperate lengths to avoid drama. It shouldn’t work as well as it does and, while a final act dip into the realms of sentimentality is perhaps to be expected, the picture maintains a base note of bittersweet astringency. It’s a title which could travel to further festivals and might be of interest to a streaming platform.

There is more than a hint of arrested adolescence about Yuichi, in the way he is glued to his phone and oblivious to everything outside of his own needs. It’s an unprepossessing combination, and one which leads us to question what, exactly, his elegant, hardworking girlfriend Satomi (Atsuko Maeda) or his life-long friend Shinji (Akiyoshi Nakao) saw in him in the first place.

Fortunately Fujigawa brings a disarmingly gauche quality to the character, with his dishevelled hair and slightly befuddled expression. And, as he peddles his push bike around Tokyo, then slumps in bus stops in snowy Tomakomai, on Hokkaido island, the story permits him ample opportunities to learn and grow. Particularly when, after Satomi confronts him with evidence of his infidelity, Yuichi flees; first from his guilt and then from each of his friends in turn, severing contact and turning off his phone.

Awareness of cinema is threaded throughout the story – both in Yuichi’s fandom (he processes his own life partly through his love of films) – and in other, more meta, references. Most interesting of these is the half acknowledgement that Yuichi’s story is a film in the making. One friend, an assistant director with aspirations to make his own movies, is fascinated by the anti-dramatic potential of Yuichi’s plight.  

At one point Yuichi’s father (Etsushi Toyokawa) – himself a warning of what life might have in hold – tells him, “The audience is bored. Time for the plot to take a turn.” But then, this is the father who has elevated avoidance of everything, and in particular his responsibilities, to an artform, who advocates a doctrine of “do nothing” and letting the world adjust by itself. Ironically, his father’s do nothing ethos is one of the closest things to a catalyst for change that Yuichi encounters on his extended escape from reality.