This article appeared in the August 2, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Moving (Shinji Sômai, 1993)

In 1993, 12-year-old Tomoko Tabata appeared in Moving, Shinji Sômai’s adaptation of a novel by Hiko Tanaka. She starred as Renko, the daughter of a couple navigating a failing marriage. Moving tracks the young protagonist’s efforts to play her parents against each other as she tries to engineer their reunion. By turns endearing, petulant, and conniving, Renko is a fascinating character, whom Tabata captures with phenomenal precision and emotion. 

Moving screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival the year of its release, and Tabata won awards from the Yokohama Film Festival and Kinema Junpo, the premier Japanese film magazine. It may be the best film by Sômai, a director who made 13 features between 1980 and 2000, and whose work has been gaining recognition in recent years for his dynamic visual sensibility and sensitive portrayals of the inner worlds of children and young adults.

The films of Sômai, who died in 2001, were hard to see in the U.S. until recently, when restorations of some of his classic titles became available—like Typhoon Club (1985), a roiling drama about young students trapped in their school during a storm, and the genre-bending Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981), which follows a young girl who inherits her father’s yakuza gang when he dies. In each of these films, Sômai thoughtfully dramatizes the passage from childhood to adulthood. 

Also situated in the same thematic terrain, Moving is one of Sômai’s most acclaimed features. Tabata, making her screen debut, was a startling discovery by Sômai: her expressive range in the film—from unnerving fits of rage to innocent daydreaming, from laughing and singing to moments of utter desolation—is astonishing, especially for an actor so young. Tabata has subsequently enjoyed an illustrious acting career on stage and screen, with roles in Yôji Yamada’s The Hidden Blade (2004); Yôichi Sai’s Blood and Bones (2004), with Takeshi Kitano and Joe Odagiri; and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana (2006). Recently, she appeared in Chime by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and on stage as Regan in a Japanese production of King Lear. 

Last year, the Japan Society mounted a revelatory series of eight Sômai films (featuring two different versions of Sailor Suit and Machine Gun), but was not able to include Moving. Thankfully, the film has since been preserved in a 4K print, which received an award for best restoration at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. It screened last month at the 17th annual JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film, where I sat down with Tabata to talk about her experience of acting in Moving, Sômai’s influence on her life and work, and her resultant career.

The restoration of Moving opens at Film at Lincoln Center on August 2 and at Metrograph on August 9.

How did you get cast in Moving?

I’m from Kyoto, and Director Sômai happened to be auditioning [actors] for the role in the area. One day I had the chance to meet him, and was called in to what turned out to be an audition for the part. Director Sômai wasn’t a very talkative person. The script was already completed. He gave it to me and told me to just memorize my lines. That’s a bare minimum for learning a role, but that’s all he told me. I was in sixth grade at the time, and it was my first time acting. Before we went shooting, I met with an assistant director. We did a form of actor training—how to project my voice and things like that. That took place for about three months before we started shooting.

What do you remember about the production?

Shooting lasted about a month and a half. To sum it up, it was a tough experience for me. We shot in Kyoto most of the time. It was like a training-camp situation, very isolated. I couldn’t go home. So I would cry every day. And call home every day. Everything was a first-time experience for me. There were so many times I wanted to quit. My grandmother once told me that if you accept something, you have to see it through. So I remembered her words and stuck through it.

Were the other actors helpful?

Kiichi Nakai, who played the dad, and Junko Sakurada, who played the mom, struggled to work with me. Director Sômai was the type of director who wouldn’t give an okay unless the take satisfied him. We would do retake after retake. There was this one scene with Kiichi Nakai—we were on location, and we had to finish shooting that day. But we didn’t get a good take. Director Sômai said, “Yeah, it’s not gonna happen. Let’s call it a day.” Kiichi Nakai went back to his dressing room and just threw cushions around out of frustration. That’s what I remember.

Was Sômai aware of how unhappy you were?

Yes. I burst into tears in front of him many times, so he was aware. He was not the type to be gentle with you just because you cry. He would say, “Okay, stop crying as soon as possible so we can move on.”

Your character throws temper tantrums, rebels at school, manipulates her parents. How did you summon those emotions?

Everything was the first time for me, so I didn’t even understand what it meant to act. Looking back, that was probably a good thing, because Sômai wasn’t the type of director to explain the scene. I hadn’t seen Moving for 20 years. Tonight is actually just my third time watching it. It’s embarrassing to see my own acting, because I really sucked back then. Director Sômai appreciated honest, genuine acting. So looking back now, I understand why he did it the way he did and didn’t try to explain things to me.

A lot of Moving unfolds in long takes with complicated camera moves. Was that difficult for you?

With Director Sômai, shooting is one long take. The combination of the sound with the beauty of his compositions—it’s almost like a fantasy world. What he created was so beautiful.

We would go on set in the morning, and go through staging and work out our movements. Then we changed into costumes and did the actual shot. But the rehearsals took so much time. He was never happy with them. Sometimes I didn’t even get to be in costume, because we were working out [the choreography of] these long takes all day. I felt a great sense of accomplishment when we filmed a long take and Director Sômai would say, “Okay.” 

You have an important part in Chime by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, another director with a distinct and precise vision.

Yes, he was very similar to Director Sômai. Director Kurosawa doesn’t talk a lot about the plot or the characters. I realize I’ve been able to work with a lot of directors in that vein. I was only on the Chime set for one day. I would try something, and he’d say, “If I see something I want to change, I’ll let you know.” I suppose what I had in mind and what he had in mind sort of matched. So shooting went very smoothly.

Director Kurosawa and Director Sômai both don’t cut a lot. There are not a lot of short takes—they don’t do a lot of close-ups or cutaways, things like that. That means as actors, we don’t have to be too concerned or to pay too much attention to what the cameras are doing. We get to focus on the role and the story. Because each shot is so long, it requires a high level of concentration. That feels good to me as a performer. 

Every time I’m on a set or on a stage, every time I act, I want to meet Sômai’s standard, and not compromise. It’s like I’m talking to him, asking him, “Is this okay? Is that okay?” What he taught me in Moving has stayed inside me. I’ve never experienced a tougher shoot than this film. Since then, I’ve taken everything that he taught me, and I give my hundred percent to anybody I work with. That’s my foundation.

Daniel Eagan is a writer and producer based in New York City.