Look Back

From Viennale

A pencil line connects two lives in Koreeda Hirokazu’s RUKKU BAKKU, a delicate film about the ways friendship can redraw us. Adapted from Fujimoto Tatsuki’s manga, it follows Fujino and Kyomoto, two gifted schoolgirls whose rivalry over their respective drawing abilities eventually dissolves into an extraordinary creative bond. One is outgoing, competitive, hungry for recognition; the other isolated, introverted and endowed with a remarkable precision of vision. Yet these differences also give rise to their intimacy. Stories, figures and backgrounds pass between them until drawing together becomes a form of osmosis. Koreeda renders their connection with an exquisitely poetic delicacy. The fine detail of the drawings, the scratch of graphite, the quiet choreography of hands at work and the shifting seasons unfold beneath a soft, weightless light. His images have an ethereal quality, but never float free of the material world: paper, pencils, landscapes and sounds anchor their shared universe. Then the narrative gathers unexpected force, and the idyll is ruptured by loss, separation and the haunting possibility of lives that might have taken another course. To look back is to redraw the invisible lines connecting one life to another. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)