I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - Mark Reviews Movies

I'll Be Your Mirror, Strand Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

In I'll Be Your Mirror, a young and recent widow travels around Japan to take photographs, do activities, meet new people, get closer to familiar ones, and figure out something about what her life is now. The conceit of writer/director Bradley Rust Gray's movie is simple, but his approach to everything between the lines of this setup is overly simplistic.

It also feels removed from any of the emotions the filmmaker is trying to explore with his central character. She's Chloe (Carla Juri), who comes from England or Germany or some other European country, and after the death of her husband, she has returned to Japan, where the two came for his work—whatever that was—some time ago—however long that was—to get away from her life—whatever that may be.

As for the husband's death, all we know about the circumstances is that it had nothing to do with illness, as another character relates, hinting at something that he doesn't feel comfortable saying. There are some flashbacks/dreams of Chloe with her spouse, as they travel across the countryside—of, again, whichever country or countries that might be—and have little adventures together.

One stop is at the mouth of an active volcano, and there's a bit of relief that, whatever may have happened to guy, he didn't fall into or get struck by debris from it. The movie teases the husband's death just enough that it's a strange choice Gray never actually reveals what happened to him, although the final moment of the husband in the story might be as close to a hint as we get.

In a way, we don't need to know what happened to Chloe's husband, of course, except that he died and she's grieving. Still, Gray sets up this mysterious air about the man's death, leaving us wondering, first, about the specifics and, ultimately, if the filmmaker knows or even cares about this key component of the story he's telling.

It's not much of one, regardless of the uncertainty. Chloe and her husband's friend Toshi (Takashi Ueno) visit his grandmother (played by Sachiko Ohshima), who tends an expansive garden. Toshi explains Chloe's situation to his grandmother and also, of course, to us, and there's something off about the placement of this scene and its continuation at the very end of the movie. It's almost as if the conversation about the husband's death was rearranged to start the movie, just in case the rest of his wandering narrative doesn't make that fact clear.

The wandering amounts to Chloe spending time with Toshi and his daughter Futaba (Futaba Okazaki), with an older gentleman named Yatsuro (Issey Ogata), and a choreographer named Cheiko (Cheiko Ito), who specializes in using people's dreams as a means of creating art and, presumably, therapy. Chloe repeatedly makes it clear that she doesn't remember her dreams if she has them, which leads to one of the more intriguing scenes of the movie when she finally does dream, realizes what it means to her, and lies as a way to keep her feelings hidden from anyone else.

There's a real clarity in that sequence, which makes one curious as to why so much of the rest of the movie is so opaque and emotionally removed. With Toshi and the daughter (The mother is just gone, apparently), Chloe spends some happy times, playing and barely making an effort to learn even a smidgen of the local language. Toshi is looking for love, and after a third date with a woman, he dismisses the notion of the relationship going any further. He has come to have feelings for Chloe, which feels more like a requirement for how the story will unfold than an actual bond between the characters.

From the older man, Chloe hears some advice about living and learns that Yatsuro's wife has cancer, while currently living with her sister. He has found himself surprised that the initial shock of the diagnosis eventually became just an ordinary fact of life for the two of them, and moving to that next step, we have to infer, is where Chloe is finding herself stuck. Everything here—Toshi's feelings for her, Yatsuro's wisdom, the choreographer's dream therapy, even the brief connection with the grandmother—is going to teach Chloe a thing or two about living after loss.

That's the full extent of the story, which quickly starts to look like a travelogue and ultimately feels about as deep as one on a thematic level. The point of I'll Be Your Mirror is painfully obvious, but Gray's meandering approach to the material offers little sense of either the pain of loss or the effort of moving forward.

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