1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 34: Whisper of the heart
This movie was released in Japan in 1995 and in the USA in 1996. The version I know is the one dubbed into English.
I first saw it in 2007. I was twenty-five, still tossed by youth’s tempests. The movie affected me considerably.
Revisiting it, what impresses me is its patience. It isn’t obvious, at first, that the movie is a love story. For a long while, it mostly just follows fourteen-year-old Shizuko in and out of buildings and trains, and up and down the sidewalks and outdoor stairways of hilly Tokyo – all of which are drawn with the naturalistic clarity that is typical of Studio Ghibli.
Shizuko is a solitary person, but she is not a loner. Her parents, sister, and friends occupy stable positions in her life. But she is driven by her own interests, so that these other people occasionally complain that she neglects them. She also neglects her studies.
She is obsessed with motifs and feelings. She does some writing. Mostly, though, she just absorbs as many stories as she can, reading dozens of library books.
She notices that one book after another has been checked out by the same borrower. She dreams of meeting this person. She even makes a few inquiries about him. But she is a little too wrapped up in her own idea of what he is like. She imagines that he is unfailingly polite (it turns out that he is not). What she does sense, correctly, is his offbeat drivenness; in this respect, she and the other book borrower are as alike as two peas.
Then, one day, she follows a strange cat around a neighborhood and ends up wandering into a shop with some marvelous antiques. …
I had better stop describing the plot. This isn’t a suspenseful movie, but it has secrets. What is revealed isn’t the solution to any great mystery, but, rather, depth of feeling.
“You complete me,” Tom Cruise says to Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. This movie, Whisper of the Heart, has similar utterances, delivered with an earnestness several orders of magnitude more powerful than in most love stories.
The movie is about unrecognized love …
unrequited love …
lovers tragically separated …
and lovers who manage to come together – who, in the fullness of time, might indeed complete one another as well as lovers could do …
who, after some struggle, are able to express this out loud.
(I think, also, of another exquisite Japanese movie, The Garden of Words, and its shattering declaration: “You saved me!”)
It’s possible to interpret the lovers’ condition, their being-in-love, as age-specific. They feel and speak so strongly because they are so young. Of course, there is something to this, but to lay all the emphasis on this point would be a mistake. Another important character, an old man, is shown to feel his own love just as intensely.
The division isn’t between the young and the old, but between those who are romantic and those who are not – or, perhaps, between those who speak frankly about their passion and those who do not (or, between those who are ready to do so, and those who are not). There is a delightful scene in which the two main lovers talk intimately upon a rooftop, in full view of a crowd of gawkers. The lovers simply ignore them. They have important things to tell one another.
As in Jerry Maguire, it’s the frankness about idealism that makes the movie so good. It’s a pleasure to watch people who are passionate about living excellently – and who recognize and love each other for it.
(The music in this video isn’t from the movie. YouTube has lots of videos made by fans of Whisper of the Heart who have mixed different scenes together and set them to other music.)
I first saw it in 2007. I was twenty-five, still tossed by youth’s tempests. The movie affected me considerably.
Revisiting it, what impresses me is its patience. It isn’t obvious, at first, that the movie is a love story. For a long while, it mostly just follows fourteen-year-old Shizuko in and out of buildings and trains, and up and down the sidewalks and outdoor stairways of hilly Tokyo – all of which are drawn with the naturalistic clarity that is typical of Studio Ghibli.
Shizuko is a solitary person, but she is not a loner. Her parents, sister, and friends occupy stable positions in her life. But she is driven by her own interests, so that these other people occasionally complain that she neglects them. She also neglects her studies.
She is obsessed with motifs and feelings. She does some writing. Mostly, though, she just absorbs as many stories as she can, reading dozens of library books.
She notices that one book after another has been checked out by the same borrower. She dreams of meeting this person. She even makes a few inquiries about him. But she is a little too wrapped up in her own idea of what he is like. She imagines that he is unfailingly polite (it turns out that he is not). What she does sense, correctly, is his offbeat drivenness; in this respect, she and the other book borrower are as alike as two peas.
Then, one day, she follows a strange cat around a neighborhood and ends up wandering into a shop with some marvelous antiques. …
I had better stop describing the plot. This isn’t a suspenseful movie, but it has secrets. What is revealed isn’t the solution to any great mystery, but, rather, depth of feeling.
“You complete me,” Tom Cruise says to Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. This movie, Whisper of the Heart, has similar utterances, delivered with an earnestness several orders of magnitude more powerful than in most love stories.
The movie is about unrecognized love …
unrequited love …
lovers tragically separated …
and lovers who manage to come together – who, in the fullness of time, might indeed complete one another as well as lovers could do …
who, after some struggle, are able to express this out loud.
(I think, also, of another exquisite Japanese movie, The Garden of Words, and its shattering declaration: “You saved me!”)
It’s possible to interpret the lovers’ condition, their being-in-love, as age-specific. They feel and speak so strongly because they are so young. Of course, there is something to this, but to lay all the emphasis on this point would be a mistake. Another important character, an old man, is shown to feel his own love just as intensely.
The division isn’t between the young and the old, but between those who are romantic and those who are not – or, perhaps, between those who speak frankly about their passion and those who do not (or, between those who are ready to do so, and those who are not). There is a delightful scene in which the two main lovers talk intimately upon a rooftop, in full view of a crowd of gawkers. The lovers simply ignore them. They have important things to tell one another.
As in Jerry Maguire, it’s the frankness about idealism that makes the movie so good. It’s a pleasure to watch people who are passionate about living excellently – and who recognize and love each other for it.
(The music in this video isn’t from the movie. YouTube has lots of videos made by fans of Whisper of the Heart who have mixed different scenes together and set them to other music.)
