Yoshiyuki Okuyama has a fascinating creative career. He’s a prominent photographer with numerous photo books, as well as directing high-profile commercials for the likes of Coca Cola and, most notably, Pocari Sweat. He produced a photobook going behind the scenes on one of the company’s spring and summer campaigns in 2018 involving over 300 high schoolers, while his 2021-directed commercial featuring reality-bending practically-filmed sequences of corridors transforming like oceans waves went viral. It’s a career defined by striking emotion-driven visual creativity, but one that exists beyond the realm of feature filmmaking. That is, until At the Bench.
First unveiled as the creator released the first episode of this anthology film on Vimeo last year, the film is broken into five chapters that are each centered on a public bench in a local town and the passing lives and events that occur in its presence. The first chapter follows childhood friends Riko and Nori catching up on the bench and recalling memories of the park they played in as kids of which the bench is its only surviving remnant as construction is set to transform the area. For all the visual flare you might expect from the director’s previous work this is very constrained, with the camera mostly static behind our characters beyond some close-ups of their faces in more expressive and reactive moments as they recall stories and discuss their inner worries on this simple bench for minutes on end.
Simplicity is not a bad thing in this instance. There’s a lot of confidence in this approach to two somewhat uncertain young adults sharing memories of the past and how things have changed since entering the work force. We feel like spectators of long-time friends catching up on old memories without feeling distant or left behind by proceedings, and the dialogue by Miku Ubukata known most notably for their work on the drama Silent. They wrote this chapter of the anthology and share credits for the film with the director, Sho Hasumi, and Shuko Nemoto. Particularly in this chapter but throughout the film, its natural, conversational dialogue was by far its biggest strength, to the point that while watching it felt more akin to being a silent observer overhearing a conversation on a train than like a member of an audience in a cinema watching two actors read from a script.
Each chapter brought new, eclectic personalities to the bench. In the second chapter a couple on the verge of a break up is having lunch while a guy who would typically sit on the bench is forced to sit behind, unable to avoid listening in as the couple humorously bicker about their lunch choices and more. Eventually he can’t help but loudly react, being invited onto the bench to continue the argument. An older sister argues with her younger sibling after she ran away from home in chapter three, in a personal favorite a film crew are recording the final scene of their film in the vicinity of the bench, and we return to the opening pair of friends at the end with the final chapter as a metaphorical and physical bookend to the film.
It’s a film dense with dialogue, and a surprising debut for a typically-visual creator. Yet that's the point: although almost entirely reliant on non-stop conversation where even we are sometimes excluded from references to memories and stories shared by these characters away from our narrow window near the bench, the uniting idea is the emotions that aren’t or can’t be expressed in words. The subtleties of body language, and how they hold back from the truth. This implicit idea becomes a bit too explicit in the film’s fourth chapter, wrote by the director himself, as the metatextual story of a director creating a film devolves into a conversation with the staff on how to film this final scene that almost labors the point.
In this chapter, conversations about what can’t be expressed with words dampen the subtlety to which this topic had been broached until this point. It's not the only chapter that fails to live up to expectations either, as the melodrama of the sisters in chapter three felt aggressive and tonally at odds with the rest of the film.
That being said, there’s much to appreciate here. Even if it doesn’t always deliver, the film is successful in creating a bustling community that believably exists beyond the purview of the bench. It’s like a small window, a vignetted preview into the lives of people who will continue to live even after the credits roll. The bookended conversations of the first and final chapters reinforce this as we talk about the lives and people we never get to see. Plus, restrictions breed creativity, and I’m particularly a fan of how the film shifts the perspective from observer to participant in chapter four with a long single-take shot filmed as two of the film’s actors, office workers considering the bench’s removal, peer at the bench from above.
At the Bench is an interesting stepping stone in the director’s career. Having proven himself in creating eye-catching commercials whose bold visual direction and emotion-driven storytelling can bring viral attention to a simple beverage, the film is proof he can go beyond the high-energy, more direct and condensed requirements of a commercial and can tell stories with purpose and meaning over an extended time. Both individually and collectively, it is successful in this, at least when it allows itself the space to be subtle and not bludgeon the point as seen in chapter four.
In turn, At the Bench is an interesting preview of the creator’s next film, an even more daunting task that is already accompanied by enormous public expectation. Okuyama has already been tapped to be the director of the upcoming live-action remake of Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second, a film whose initial announcement came with a mix of intrigue and concern at plans to bring the beloved film to life once again, expanding its runtime and story in the process. Yet there are certainly thematic similarities between this debut work and this upcoming remake, each dominated by the deafening silence of what is left unsaid. If anything, it puts me at ease knowing that the creator has the capabilities to do this film justice.
Our true feelings are often left unsaid. At times this is fine, at times it leaves us with unspoken regrets that never truly go away. These are five short films united by this common idea, and with a few exceptions is mostly successful at this. At just 33 with an impressive resume in commercials and now this film, Yoshiyuki Okuyama has cemented himself as an exciting creator to watch.
