What is the shape or condition of life? And conversely, of death? Maybe death is the more natural and common condition, while life is a short trip that ends with death.
What if suicide doesn’t arise from the desire to not live anymore? What if the impulse to kill oneself isn’t something existential, but instead, the result of a bacteria or virus? What if “suicide” is like a cold or a fever, something that can be “cured” if scientists discover a vaccine for the micro-organism that causes one to think about this drastic step? This is a snatch of conversation we hear at the beginning of Isamu Hirabayashi’s Japanese-Finnish feature debut, Shell and Joint, which is playing at the Dharamsala International Film Festival. The woman who voices these thoughts is a hotel employee who has made multiple attempts on her life. She’s clearly thought about the subject a lot.
Her name is Sakamoto (Mariko Tsutsui), and she is talking to her male colleague (and boss), Nitobe (Keisuke Horibe). They seem to be sitting at what looks like the reception area, behind a desk. Sakamoto is a nihilist. She says, “I don’t care about becoming something to prove my existence. It wasn’t my choice to exist. But here I am. I just don’t care.” Nitobe, on the other hand, thinks a lot about existence. He thinks about how one little cell evolved over billions of years to reach a point, today, to build the computer. He thinks that life had a chance to emerge many billions of years ago, and it took advantage of it. Sakamoto thinks he fears death. “Your view of life from the cosmic perspective removes fear of death.”
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Karthik
October 27, 2020
BR, this was a wonderful read even if I dont think I can work up my cinematic curiosity enough to watch the movie.
I found this particularly intriguing
He muses that souls must decompose the same way bodies do. Otherwise, there’d be billions of souls around. Hindus may differ, as they believe souls are “eternal” things that simply acquire new bodies, but it may not be so clear-cut with the rest of the world
I recently happened to catch this Marathi movie, Cycle which for obvious reasons draws comparisons to Bicycle Thieves. Both films track the aftermath of the theft of a bicycle that is “dearer than life” to their protagonists, both of whom have a child as a conscience keeper. (Interestingly both films are set in 1948). They are of course very different in other ways. Cycle a fairly tale whereas Bicycle Thieves is genre definingly neorealist.
The difference that struck me was precisely what you wrote about soul. At some level, Bicycle Thieves traces the “decomposing” of Antonio’s soul. Whereas, in Cycle the bicycle becomes the metaphor for a soul that awakens the inner humanity of those it touches. In the end, the material nature of the bicycle disappears and what’s left is a shared spirit that bridges all the characters in the film. The two movies show the difference in faiths in another way as well. The western faith is something that is reached out to, whereas the Indian/Hindu faith preaches reaching into. The search in Bicycle Thieves is external, almost methodical, even for a needle in a haystack. In Cycle, the actual search for the bicycle is not defined at all, and the real search is inward. I know that two movies hardly count as significant data, but it did make me wonder how the prevailing nature of faith influences the filmmaking.
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Yajiv
October 28, 2020
@Karthik:
Thank you for mentioning Cycle. It is an under-watched gem (at least in India) so I’m glad someone else has seen it too.
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Karthik
October 28, 2020
Yajiv I quite enjoyed Cycle, glad to hear you did too. I havent watched too many Marathi movies, but the ones I did have some solid writing and are visually quite nice too. It would be nice if they are more widely marketed.
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