Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Confessions
2010 · Tetsuya Nakashima · Confessions on Sightlines
It starts with milk. A homeroom of thirteen-year-olds sits with little cartons on their desks, half-listening, chatting, slumped. At the front a teacher talks to them in an even voice. She doesn't shout. She keeps talking, about her job, about her four-year-old daughter who has died, about what she has learned since, for nearly half an hour. The class drifts in and out. We don't. Somewhere in that calm, the room's temperature drops and stays down for the rest of the film.
That monologue is the best way into Confessions, and into the Deleuzian ideas that help explain why it lands so hard. Notice what the teacher is doing. She isn't recounting events the camera then shows us as plain fact. She is speaking, and the speaking itself is the event. Deleuze, writing about modern cinema, singled out the speech-act: a voice that doesn't just report a story but does something by telling it, as testimony, accusation or verdict. In older films a character's account was a bridge to the action. Here the account is the action. A teacher at a lectern, a carton of milk, a bored room: Tetsuya Nakashima builds his first big set piece out of almost nothing except a woman choosing her words.
Then the film hands the voice to someone else, and then someone else again. Adapting Kanae Minato's bestselling novel, Nakashima arranges the story as a sequence of confessions, each from a different person tied to the same past, and each one changes what the previous ones meant. The obvious ancestor is Rashomon, which established the serial-testimony structure: one event retold through successive, contradictory first-person accounts. Confessions takes that device and names itself after it.
The difference is worth thinking about. Classical film theory leaned on a quiet contract: the flashback might be one character's memory, but the camera vouched for it. What we were shown had happened. Kurosawa broke that contract, and Deleuze would later describe a whole "power of the false" in modern cinema, where incompatible versions stand side by side and truth can't be settled. Confessions goes partway down that road and then turns. Its confessions don't so much cancel each other as cut deeper into the same block of time. Deleuze calls this sheets of past. The past isn't a single dated scene you return to through a flashback. It's a layered region you can enter at different depths, and each entry shows a different face of it. Every new narrator in Confessions drops us into another layer of the same few months, and what looked like a fact turns out to be one surface among several. That's why the image of a trap snapping shut in stages fits the film so well. Nothing gets undone. Each stage tightens what came before it.
Then there is how it looks. Nakashima came from television commercials and from the candy-colored maximalism of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, his own earlier film, which was hyper-saturated and dense with songs. In Confessions he keeps the same tools and drains the color out of them. The grade is a cold, nearly monochrome blue-gray, a debt to Se7en and its clinical, procedural chill. Deleuze has a name for color that does more than decorate. In the color-image, a single hue soaks up a scene and its feeling until the color is the affect. Watch how this blue settles over the classroom, the corridors, the faces. It doesn't signal sadness the way a sad song would. It's the medium everyone lives in, a world where warmth has been subtracted.
The slow motion is the most disturbing invention, and it's where Nakashima's advertising past turns into something new. Commercials live on what Deleuze, following Bergson, calls privileged instants: the posed, perfect moment lifted out of the flow of time and held up to be admired. The splash of the drink, the hair turning in the light. Nakashima applies that grammar to cruelty. Moments of adolescent viciousness stretch out like syrup, timed to needle-drops (Radiohead among them) that play with unnerving serenity. The lineage is plain enough: Trainspotting's pop-song scoring fused to kinetic montage, Requiem for a Dream's tempo bent by music cues, Battle Royale's slow-motion bloodletting in a junior-high setting. But the effect here is particular. The privileged instant was invented to make you want something. Turned on violence among children, it makes you feel, uncomfortably, how good it looks, and asks why a culture of beautiful instants might produce kids who experience cruelty as a kind of clip.
This is what the film does to narrative. A revenge story, a mystery, a school drama: on paper these are action genres, built on discovery and deeds. Confessions keeps moving its weight from deeds to telling. The decisive acts mostly reach us inside someone's account, framed by a voice with its own motives. So the question shifts from whodunit to why, and that why is asked of more than one person. The film made Japan's Oscar shortlist and became a phenomenon at home, and the reason may be that it refuses to locate the rot in one villain. Adult grief and adolescent nihilism feed each other, confession by confession.
What Nakashima added to film as an art is a demonstration that the stylistic machinery of pop seduction (the grade, the slow motion, the perfect song at the perfect moment) can be turned on itself and made to testify. On a first watch, pay attention to who is speaking and to whom. Each confession has a listener, and each listener changes what gets said. When the slow motion arrives, notice whether you're leaning in. The film is counting on that.
Concepts in play
- speech-act (acte de parole) — The opening monologue of nearly half an hour to an indifferent class, where telling is itself the event; the whole film is built as a series of spoken confessions
- sheets of past — Competing confessions from different narrators, each recasting what came before; one stretch of the past entered at successive depths instead of through a single dated flashback
- powers of the false — The Rashomon-derived serial-testimony structure breaks the camera's guarantee of truth, although the confessions deepen each other more than they cancel each other out
- affective colour (colour-image) — The near-monochrome desaturated blue-gray grade (a Se7en debt), which inverts Nakashima's hyper-saturated Memories of Matsuko and absorbs every scene's feeling
- privileged instants — Syrupy slow motion locked to needle-drops (including Radiohead) laid over cruelty: the posed perfect moment of advertising grammar applied to violence