Film Review #34: RING WANDERING

Film Review #34: RING WANDERING

*This film review may contain plot spoilers, reader discretion is advised.*

*本篇影评含雷，请斟酌阅读。

There is a certain magic that happens when old pictures are colourised - the past suddenly becomes more recognisable, it becomes steeped in reality, and we feel more connected to a moment. Maskazu Kaneko’s Ring Wandering brings the Japanese past into full colour, making it seem so real you can carry it on your back, you can joke with it, have dinner with it. It’s a tender, personal and quiet way of understanding our histories.

The film follows Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu), a manga artist, as he tries to find an accurate representation of the extinct Japanese wolf for his manga, in which his main character seeks to duel the last surviving Japanese wolf. Sosuke, a construction worker, finds an animal skull buried in Tokyo’s earth, allowing him to meet Midori (Junko Abe), a lively and curious woman who is looking for her lost dog.

Ring Wandering does a good job of telling the story of a country that has changed rapidly - a man in 1905 hunting the last Japanese Wolf at the time of the Russo-Japanese War confronting his loss, the true catastrophe of World War II, and the buried stories from the Tokyo Olympics construction boom. The well-designed settings do a great job of guiding the audience through very different time periods and aesthetics, spanning more than a century. The night scenes, in particular, have an atmosphere so mysterious there seems to be an air of magic. The end result is like a beautiful dream, suspended in time.

Film still from Ring Wandering

As Sosuke and Midori search for her dog, their chemistry blossoms and this makes the film a particularly endearing one. In an especially tender moment when Midori is bidding farewell to Sosuke at the end of the night, she keeps following him, distracting him and continuing the conversation as if she doesn’t want him to leave, not wanting to break the spell. Sosuke doesn’t seem to want to leave, either, and instead stares at Midori, trying to sear her image into his memory.

FIlm still from Ring Wandering

Watching this film put me in a reflective mood, as most quiet films tend to do. When landscapes change, so do our memories of those places and stories. Perhaps no other country has gone through as much change as Singapore had since independence, at least geographically. The quick developments and changes to landscapes causes me to disconnect from my grandparent’s Singapore, and it’s easier to forget that Singapore is also full of layered histories.

RING WANDERING is now playing at The Projector.