‘Yakushima’s Illusion’ Review: Vicky Krieps and Naomi Kawase Team Up for a Cross-Cultural Tearjerker

Organ donation may be a miracle of modern medicine, though in Japan, it remains a divisive practice, in conflict with certain cultural and religious views on the limits of mortality and the body. For Corry (Vicky Krieps), a French expert in pediatric heart transplants working in a hi-tech Kobe hospital, such resistance is hard to understand — and that’s before a separate personal crisis further confronts her with the debate regarding when to call time on a human life. Melodramatic contrivance yields nuanced philosophical rumination in “Yakushima’s Illusion,” the first fiction feature in five years from Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase, and one typical of her oeuvre in its blending of lush sentimentality with more fragile interior ambiguities.

Premiering in competition at Locarno, “Yakushima’s Illusion” sees Kawase resuming the exploration of Eastern versus Western sensibilities that she first began in 2018’s Juliette Binoche vehicle “Vision,” once more with a French-speaking star in the lead. As it turns out, Krieps and Kawase are well-matched collaborators — the Luxembourgish star has a gently reserved, quizzical presence that complements and grounds the director’s airy mystique — while the film itself has a firmer narrative spine and richer current of feeling than the teasingly esoteric “Vision.” The result could be Kawase’s most widely seen work since 2015’s “Sweet Bean,” give or take her official film for the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The film’s opening montage immediately bears the director’s stamp with its cascade of rapturous natural and sensual imagery: the sun rising over mist-scarfed wooded hills; broad, ancient tree trunks surging up to shimmering spring foliage; human bodies entwined and caressing in milky early-morning light. A brief, visceral glimpse of open heart surgery disrupts the blissed-out flow, anticipating the shifting states of mind of our heroine. At once a pragmatist and a romantic, Corry sometimes struggles to keep her scientific brain from intruding on moments of sensory abandon and unguarded feeling.

A slip-sliding timeline introduces her in the present day, briskly doing her hospital rounds and demonstrating a kindly, reassuring bedside manner with her young patients and their distressed families. That’s in pointed contrast to the quiet steel she shows in meetings with fellow medical professionals, where she’s often arguing for organ transplants over attitudes of either entrenched skepticism or weary resignation. For one patient, she’s told, a new heart is being flown in from a hospital in Kagoshima — cue a flashback to a hiking vacation Corry took three years before to nearby Yakushima Island, the source of the gorgeous wild vistas from the film’s introduction.

On one of the forest trails there, she meets handsome, taciturn photographer Jin (Kanichiro), and the two are immediately drawn to each other. Though their ensuing relationship is seemingly founded on a mutual melancholy and calmness of spirit, crucial differences emerge over time, as her career-oriented urban routine clashes with his spontaneity and yen for adventure. One day, he suddenly vanishes, joining the ranks of what the Japanese call the “Johatsu,” literally translating as “the evaporated”: people who voluntarily drop out from their established lives, families and social circles, sometimes with the assistance of specialist agencies to facilitate the disappearance.

To Corry, it’s a choice as unaccountable as the opposition to life-saving surgery that she routinely encounters in her profession, and opens up a host of gnawing questions: When does a disappearance become a death? How do you know if someone is lost, or merely doesn’t want to be found? Further, staggered flashbacks reveal Corry’s lifelong anxiety over abandonment, stemming from the death of her mother in childbirth; the personal resonance of her mission at work to heal young families facing death and disease becomes poignantly clear. Gradually, as a meandering narrative comes to focus on the case of Hisashi (Ojiro Nakamura), a cheery young boy awaiting a heart transplant, the film’s intellectual and emotional interests come to a satisfying (and aggressively tear-jerking) head.

“Yakushima’s Illusion” can feel structurally fussy, sometimes darting back in time to underline plot points that are already implicit. Masaya Suzuki and Arata Dodo’s lensing is eye-bathingly limpid throughout, though the film’s lucent aesthetic can tip into kitsch at points: Kawase can’t resist, for example, a radiantly lit close-up of a child’s face streaked by a single tear. But it’s genuinely moving, in large part because Krieps’ performance gives it such a steady, stoic undertow of unspoken sorrow, even when delivering tall-order lines like, “In the tree, there was another me; in another me, eternity.” Life, and death, keep drawing Corry from whimsy back to harder realities, and the same goes for Kawase’s latest.