Drawing Closer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hand that doesn't quite get taken. An umbrella held over two people who are each careful not to lean. That's the register of touch Takahiro Miki works in, and in a film about two teenagers with a combined eighteen months left to live, it can look like squeamishness — a genre keeping itself chaste. Look again. The gesture that stops just short is the method, and the title says so out loud: drawing closer, never arriving.

The Japanese title is blunter still. It translates roughly as the story of me, with a year left to live, meeting you, with six months left. The film gives away its ending on the poster. That is a strange thing for a movie to do, and it's exactly why Deleuze is worth having in the room.

His big division is simpler than its reputation. In most films, someone perceives a situation and does something about it, and the doing changes the situation: perception feeds action, action resolves, the cutting serves that chain. He calls this the movement-image. Sometimes the chain snaps. What a character sees is too large or too fixed for anything they could do about it, so they watch and endure instead, and time stops being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you're looking at. That's the time-image.

Drawing Closer is built around a situation no act can touch. Akito has about a year. She has six months. Nothing either of them does moves those numbers. Deleuze names the moment a cinema discovers this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found it in postwar Italy, in rubble and dispersed lives, a historical accident that broke a form. Here the same hole is manufactured — a premise, a pitch, a diagnosis. The cause is nothing alike. The formal consequence is identical. Suspense is unavailable. The film has to run on something else.

It runs on faces. Deleuze's affection-image is a feeling that registers but never discharges into action, and its natural home is the close-up. When there is nothing to do with a feeling, the face is where it stays. So the editing waits: reaction shots run long, cuts hold on realization and grief, and performance becomes the load-bearing element of the whole picture. Deleuze draws a finer line here that this genre lives on. There's the reflexive face — a still surface holding one quality, tenderness or dread, contour rather than event — and the intensive face, features working, micro-movements climbing toward a threshold. The crying-movie contract is a long ration of the first and a scarce, detonating dose of the second. Ren Nagase, an idol lead playing against type, spends most of the film almost shy. That withholding is what makes the few breakdowns worth anything.

Then it runs on light. Deleuze gives light two great cinematic treatments. Expressionism is the war of shadow and gradient, things charged with a non-organic life. Lyrical abstraction is the other road: white, luminance, light as flood rather than struggle — what he calls the spiritual alternative. Miki is entirely in the second camp. Backlight, diffusion, lens flare as punctuation, highlights blown out and treated as beauty rather than error. The 2024 technology matters more than it looks: this is a fully digital Netflix original graded for HDR, and that latitude is what makes deliberate overexposure repeatable and controllable. Shunji Iwai had to go hunt real snow-glare for Love Letter in 1995. Now it's a dial. The light is doing metaphysical work the plot has forfeited. It isn't saying the world is dark. It's saying the world is running out, which is a different problem and needs a different palette.

And it runs on weather. Deleuze noticed an inversion in the musical: at a certain pitch the dancer stops driving the movement and the world moves instead, the dance absorbing the dancer. He calls it the movement of world. Miki's signature set-piece — the wordless, score-led montage of small seasonal gestures, inherited whole from Iwai's April Story — works exactly this way. The lovers go nearly still. Blossom, summer glare, rain, and a piano-and-strings theme carry all the motion. In a countdown film that's not decoration. It's the only honest picture of what's actually happening to them: they aren't going anywhere. Time is.

Because nothing advances the plot, the everyday can be held. Deleuze's word for those stretches is dead time, temps mort, and in Antonioni they're a symptom — meaning has drained out of the world. Here they're the prize. A kitchen. A school corridor. The riverside. If the outcome is settled before the first scene, an ordinary afternoon isn't filler; it's the content. That's the genre's real argument, and this film's.

One more Deleuzian distinction earns its keep. A frame can open onto adjacent space — someone standing just off to the left. Or it can open onto something with no location at all, a whole pressing in on everything inside the rectangle. That's the absolute out-of-field. The countdown is the second kind. It isn't a place, it's an amount, and it sits in every shot of ordinary happiness, which is why the cutting keeps returning to the clock. You feel it and can't point at it.

Against that, the film builds a small machine. The repeated objects — a drawing, a notebook, a shared list of things to do — are what Deleuze calls a symbol: an object that condenses a film's organizing relation. The list converts time-you-have into time-you-spend. It re-installs a miniature perceive-act-resolve circuit inside a situation that has none. Cross one off, and something did change. This is why Akito's project of making a dying girl happy is structurally necessary and not merely sweet: it's the last action left with a reachable target.

Miki inherits nearly all of this, and naming the debts precisely is the point. Love Letter (1995) supplies the visual grammar outright: backlit winter diffusion, blown-out glare, shallow-focus close-ups, lyricism carried by montage instead of plot. April Story (1998) supplies the music-video set-piece logic, image and music fused into narration. Isao Yukisada's Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World (2004) starts the modern boom and the dramatic-irony countdown, though its engine is a dual-timeline flashback withholding the death — in Deleuze's terms a dated memory-image, the past staged as a former present. Miki's variation drops the retrospect entirely and keeps everything in the present tense of the count, which is why his film has no mystery and needs none. Be with You (2004) codifies the rainy-season mono-no-aware melodrama on a fixed deadline, tone over incident. A Song to the Sun (2006) assembles the exact commercial package — idol lead, illness clock, tie-in ballad — that this film reassembles for streaming. Heavenly Forest (2006) supplies the performance mode: Aoi Miyazaki underplaying a concealed fatal illness, naturalism doing the work of revelation.

Forward, be honest: the lineage record here runs mostly one way. This is a late chapter, not a founding one, and what it transmits is industrial rather than formal — the cycle's migration from a domestic theatrical run to day-one global streaming, and a form refined until it's legible without cultural translation.

So what does a minor film do to the art? This one demonstrates something the mainstream rarely gets credit for: it reached the impasse the modernists reached, and solved it commercially. When action can't fix anything, cinema still has light, faces, weather, and duration — and those turn out to be enough to hold ninety minutes. Antonioni got there through despair. Miki gets there through consolation, and the consolation is the part worth arguing about. The film's whole position is that a compressed life, fully felt, is not a diminished one. Whether that beautiful, blown-out light is honesty or anesthesia is a real question, and the film hands the answer to the actors. Watch their faces while the light floods them. That's where it's decided.