Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch 18x2 Beyond Youthful Days
2024 · Michihito Fujii · 18x2 Beyond Youthful Days on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the gold light of Taiwan against Japan's blue and white. (light)
Imamura contrasts the golden, humid palette of the Tainan scenes with the cold blues and whites of Japanese snow country, so you know which time period you're in by temperature alone.
Payoff: Color tells you where and when you are before any date or place name does. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls a color used this way affective color, a quality that carries feeling on its own rather than describing a place.
Watch Jimmy pass through trains, guesthouses, and internet cafes. (setting)
The present-day story unspools almost entirely through transient, anonymous spaces, trains, guesthouses, small bars, rather than anywhere Jimmy actually belongs.
Payoff: None of these places hold him, which is exactly the point of a man traveling nowhere in particular. In the reading: any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). Deleuze's any-space-whatever names a space that has stopped staging action and become pure feeling, which is what these non-places do here.
Listen for the recurring rhythm of trains under the story. (sound)
The soundtrack keeps returning to the rhythm, announcements, and motion of trains, tying the act of remembering to the physical act of traveling somewhere slow.
Payoff: The film asks you to hear memory as a place you can still catch a train toward.
Watch Hsu play both the eighteen-year-old and the older Jimmy. (performance)
Greg Hsu carries the film across two ages, asking his face to hold disappointment and leftover hope at once in the present-day scenes.
Payoff: The way he plays the older Jimmy's wistfulness sets the emotional register for everything the past reveals.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the trains and the color of the light. Memory here is somewhere you can still travel to.