Shiki-Jitsu (literally “Ritual Day") was Hideaki Anno’s second live-action feature film – the first being Love & Pop. But visually the two films couldn’t be further apart. Although Shiki-Jitsu loosely involves the shooting of a documentary, Anno ditches the oddly-placed and sometimes shaky camera angles utilized in Love & Pop for a more traditional cinematic style using 35mm film and a surreal color palette which often ranges anywhere from red to redder.
An important aspect of understanding this story is knowing the inspiration behind it. Ayako Fujitani is actually uber-tool Stephen Seagal’s daughter and she wrote the novel after the time she spent in Los Angeles during filming of his 1998 film The Patriot. That was an emotionally trying time in her life and she decided to write a fictional story based on that, also drawing on her feelings of alienation growing up as a multiracial child in Japan.
Shiki-Jitsu tells the story of an anime director (played by real-life indie director Shuji Awai) who returns to his hometown and meets a very oddly dressed young woman (Ayako Fujitani) who seems to be at best eccentric, and at worst completely bonkers. She gives him a pack of cigarettes (he’s out) and casually mentions that tomorrow is her birthday. He goes back to her the next day bearing gifts but she refuses them, fending off his hand-outs with her ever-present red umbrella before once again explaining “tomorrow is my birthday”. Apparently tomorrow is always her birthday, a fact that initially seems like an oddball catchphrase but as more days go by it seems more like a side-effect of her vastly damaged psyche.
The director feels a pull to stay with the girl and help her through her problems because he sees an ironic parallel in their respective situations. He wants to escape his life in fiction by dealing more in reality and she wants to escape reality by creating a fictional life for herself. He decides to start recording her day-to-day activities under the pretext of filming a documentary.
They spend most every day together over the next month, with him witnessing the best and worst aspects of her personality over that time. She has obvious suicidal tendencies. For instance, every day at 6am she climbs onto the ledge of her roof and makes a conscious decision about whether she’s okay or not. If she’s okay she doesn’t jump off. Over time she incorporates his presence into her daily ritual to the point where she begins to need him around to feel okay. When he’s not around or doesn’t say the right thing to quell her fear of abandonment she becomes reclusive and temperamental. Over time he begins to feel the burden of her mental state but whenever he lets that show she notices and her behavior gets even more erratic out of the fear that he’ll end up hating her. He starts to wonder if he can ever really help her or if one morning she’ll climb out onto that ledge and decide she’s really not okay after all.
I will freely admit that for nearly two full hours I was riveted by this film. So much so that I may have expected too much from the ending. I know I at least expected a big reveal or shocking plot twist. What I got was Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. The only twist in this one is that there is no twist. Two solid hours of melodramatic build-up and then ffft, fizzle. Now, does that mean I completely hated this movie? Absolutely not - I actually liked it a lot. The visuals are fantastic, the pacing is perfect, and Fujitani is nothing short of amazing as an emotionally-disturbed recluse (at times I wondered how much of it was acting). All I’m saying is that for me, when it comes to Shiki-Jitsu the satisfaction gleaned from the experience is more about the ride than the actual destination.
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