Desert of Namibia

At 19, with Amiko, Yôko Yamanaka became the youngest director to be invited to screen a feature at the Berlin Film Festival. Her second feature, Desert of Namibia, won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, and critics have put it in a bracket with the bruising emotional work of John Cassavetes and Maurice Pialat. It’s a portrait of an arrogant, attractive, diffident, “difficult” 21-year-old woman, Kana (a mesmerizing Yuumi Kawai), who works at a Tokyo beauty clinic and numbly drifts between boyfriends, leaving wreckage in her wake.

Kana is aimless, rootless, and distracted. At an intentionally protracted 137 minutes, the movie is intently focused, claustrophobic (shot in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio), and demands concentration. Kana would probably last about 10 seconds, if it crossed her feed. That would be her loss, because the film speaks to Gen Z ennui with acerbic wit and clear feeling.

Kawai’s masterful, multilayered performance, which presents Kana more as willful and lost than born bad and raised wrong, both exposes and humanizes her.

Japan Times

Desert of Namibia offers a refreshing perspective on contemporary Japanese culture rarely seen in cinema.

Louis Roberts, Loud and Clear