Cinema as Therapy: The Mourning Forest

The notion of cinema as therapy is dangerous: not only can’t cinema replace therapy, using cinema as therapy can be harmful to mental health. Yet The Mourning Forest (2007, dir. Naomi Kawase) comes at such a right and crucial time that I can’t overlook its therapeutic power. Amidst the purgatory that is the world in 2020, The Mourning Forest was exactly the film I needed.

20 minutes into The Mourning Forest, there appears to be a facility for the elderly or those in mourning. The stench of (inevitable) death emanates in the room. But in this deadly environment, we’re looking at a birthday celebration. These grand concepts of life (birth! death!), contrasted through ordinary rituals (which is an oxymoron; how can a celebration be low-key?), remind me of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), my favorite film of all-time. The Mourning Forest shares what I love so much about Yi Yi – how a film can be so small yet so big, so big because it’s small. The Mourning Forest, especially its first half, consists of people doing the most mundane tasks, yet manages to be galactic in scope, without big bang explosions or stargate sequences. Kawase isn’t afraid to literally  state the meaning of life, because she very much captures it. In lush greens and city lights, in rolling in fields and microaggressions, and unfortunately, in violence against women, there are all the facets of “feeling alive”. The Mourning Forest demonstrates a mantra I hold close to my heart: in art, the micro is macro, and the specific is universal.

A connecting force.

The first half of The Mourning Forest is largely plotless, almost docu-fictional, so I was a little disappointed when Kawase essentially turned her movie into a road trip with artificial stakes (oh, how convenient it is for the car to break down right when we need it to). But this road trip is more Apichatpong Weerasethakul than Mad Max: Fury Road. Aside from one or two plot conveniences, Kawase unravels the plot in mysterious and revelatory ways, eventually going back to where we started: extrapolating gigantic life lessons from the smallest moments. Just two people walking, burning wood, naked – there’s such powerful spiritual cleansing in such raw simplicity and intimacy. The clean elegance of the plot helps, but ultimately the power comes from audiovisuals. “Feeling alive” lives in the buoyancy of Kawase’s camera and the enveloping sound design. It lives in her visual, Taoist connections of tiny human gestures to the earth-shattering rapids of nature. Thanks to cinema, a single person’s journey can be as big as a forest.

What is the place for cinema in such trying times? There exists a little shame in watching an obscure Japanese movie when a national uprising is literally happening outside, much like how I felt in Hong Kong last year. It’s increasingly difficult to find a place in the world for a movie so seemingly detached from current social landscapes. And I actually can’t fully defend it, other than resorting to some “art is transcendent” pretentious rhetoric. But art does indeed speak to us in such profound, emotional ways, and for just 97 minutes, it can be so therapeutic, even when it isn’t right. Maybe that is an inherent sin in cinema, that it inherently constitutes escapism. But if there’s any escapism I’d fall for, I’d rather it be Kawase than Transformers. And if cinema is inherently bad, then artists like Kawase are pushing it to its least evil. They are finding good in the evil, and is there anything more applicable or inspiring to recent times?

It feels wrong to watch The Mourning Forest today, yet it feels so right. Or to even write this blog. This functions as a summary to the entire quarter as well: thanks to life-threatening situations like COVID-19 and the ongoing protests around the world, art has never mattered less, yet has also never mattered more. The Mourning Forest exemplifies this paradox – it’s naïve, detached, and even irrelevant, yet profound, exemplary, and reinvigorating.