A Man: an uneven existential procedural

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival

Set in a quiet Japanese town, A Man begins by introducing us to Rie, a divorced woman running a stationery store with her young son Yuto in tow. Reeling from the dissolution of her marriage, Rie gets to know a customer named Daisuke, and a romance blossoms between them – until a tragic accident thrusts Daisuke’s identity into question.

For the first half of the film, director Ishikawa Kei paints Rie’s grief and her new relationship with confident strokes. Sometimes placing Rie in the background while relatives whisper about her in the foreground, Ishikawa enlarges the cinematic space with aplomb, allowing tensions and contradictions as well as harmonies to emerge. In such flourishes, Ishikawa’s musings about identity – the one we construct for ourselves, and the ones others construct for us – are keenly felt.

Ishikawa switches gears in the second half, substituting the beats of an investigative thriller for the hitherto elegiac family drama. With echoes of Ishikawa’s 2016 debut feature, Gukoroku – Traces of Sin, A Man charts the investigation of “Daisuke”’s real identity by the zainichi lawyer Kido, with more interest in the philosophies and impulses that drive “Daisuke” – and in the ethnic baggage carried by the Korean Kido as he pursues his investigation – than in the rhythms of a straightforward whodunnit.

Like Gukoroku and Ishikawa’s Listen to the Universe (2019), A Man is adapted from a novel, in this case Hirano Keiichiro’s 2018 book of the same name. But the bipartite structure Ishikawa opts for lets him down. Kido’s story comes at the cost of Rie’s; she abruptly becomes a marginal figure, and any deeper character development for her is abandoned. It’s a strange decision, given that Rie is the emotional heart of the film: her loss and her burden are what drove the narrative in the first place.

One might cynically dismiss this as the well-trodden path that many female characters have walked: their pain indulged in and exploited for a story’s stakes, their grief driving the adventures of a film’s male characters. But Ishikawa’s ability in the film’s first half to so memorably capture how grief pierces Rie’s most ordinary moments makes the 90-degree narrative shift even more disappointing. The few scenes of Rie and Yuto in the second hour shine with an aching tenderness, as they contemplate who Daisuke really was to them. Watching the pair ruminate on love, fathers and husbands, it becomes ever clearer that Daisuke’s deeds – kind, real and true – matter far more to them than hard-and-fast names and identities.