Suzumoto and Sumi creatively master their independent lives while living in a park in Nagoya. In contrast, a middle-class family is caught up in pressure and routine. The two threads of the story gradually intertwine, until a tragic escalation occurs. Shot with a black-and-white documentary feel, yet highly stylized, the film analyzes the contradictions and pathologies of modern society.
Suzumoto and Sumi creatively master their independent lives while living in a park in Nagoya. In contrast, a middle-class family is caught up in pressure and routine. The two threads of the story gradually intertwine, until a tragic escalation occurs. Shot with a black-and-white documentary feel, yet highly stylized, the film analyzes the contradictions and pathologies of modern society.
_Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective._
When choosing films to watch, I'm really bad about looking at what other works I might have seen by the same director. It's much more likely that I would notice a common actor—of course, because (usually) their faces are visible. So it wasn't until after watching _My House_, while looking for more background and marking it as viewed on my various tracking sites (there's a universe outside Trakt?!), that the title of another Tsutsumi film caught my eye: _The House Where the Mermaid Sleeps_ (2018).\* I happened upon that one while unable to sleep on a transatlantic flight not too long after it came out, so it was loaded on the plane's entertainment system. _Mermaid_ was a superb choice for keeping me awake.
_My House_ didn't pack quite the same emotional punch for me, but it's anyone's guess whether that's because I'm different, because Tsutsumi's style improved in the six years between films, some combination of both, or something else entirely. Still, it makes for a surprisingly compelling watch. Having seen Motofumi Hasekawa's _Arano_ (2020)\^ just a day before, the contrast is striking. Both films run at a pretty leisurely pace; but where Hasekawa seemed to stretch a limited narrative to fit a feature film's runtime, Tsutsumi took a complex interplay of social dynamics and distilled it down to the essentials that could be shown in just 90 minutes.
I won't say that _My House_ has a satisfying ending—plenty is left open—but it certainly does make a lingering point.
\* — https://trakt.tv/movies/the-house-where-the-mermaid-sleeps-2018
\^ — https://trakt.tv/movies/arano-2020
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