Ritual

Ritual is a film about waiting, and it asks the audience to wait along with its characters. Railway tracks, level crossings, power lines and empty industrial halls fill the frame, spaces built to be passed through and not to be lived in. Even the girl’s room feels less like a home than a waiting room. There is little in the way of conventional plot, only the repetition of a single ritual: tomorrow is my birthday. In Anno’s hands, these places of transit become more than scenery. They turn the film into a reflection on its own medium, because cinema is a transitory medium by nature. A film image exists only while it moves, and what we call a moving picture is a rapid sequence of still frames, much like a train that advances by passing one fixed sleeper after another. The train is no random choice here, since cinema and the railway were born as twins of modernity. The Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is often treated as an origin point of cinema, and the link runs deeper than subject matter. In a cinema, as on a train, we sit motionless while the world rushes past a rectangular frame. The monotonous rhythm of crossing signals and passing carriages can then be heard as the acoustic counterpart to the clatter of the projector. The girl has settled in a place that was never meant for living, as if she were trying to take root in transit because she fears both the future and the past. The machinery of film keeps her in motion without ever letting her arrive. What elevates Ritual beyond a moody art film is its meta layer. The filmmaker, played by Shunji Iwai, keeps recording the girl with a grainy video camera, while Anno answers with sweeping, beautiful compositions of the same world. The look through the lens and the look from a train window become one and the same transitory act, both trying to catch a reality that is already gone, and the director is so busy capturing her that he nearly misses what stands right in front of him. It is tempting to see Anno in this figure, but the film is based on Ayako Fujitani’s novella Tohimu, drawn from her own depression, so the pain belongs to her first. Anno’s contribution is the question of what a camera can actually do for someone who is already disappearing. The red accents, the umbrella and above all the shoes in close-up, carry more than one meaning. In Japanese tradition red is associated with protection against evil spirits, and here it is also tied to her mother, since the shoes and the umbrella are the last gifts she received from her. Red is therefore both armor and keepsake, a way of holding on to what is lost. This sets the film apart from Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, itself drawn from Andersen’s fairy tale, where the shoes are a curse that never tires and keeps their wearer moving until it destroys her, and where the heroine dies on a railway track. Ritual inverts this: the color that condemns the heroine of the fairy tale protects the girl here, yet the protection turns into confinement, because it keeps her moving in a loop without arrival, tied to the trains and tracks around her. Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is how it treats its own ritual. Her birthday is a deferral, a day she refuses to reach, and the waiting itself becomes the ritual. The ending neither punishes nor rescues her: she circles December 7 as her real birthday, and the screen reads “beyond the 33rd day: unknown.” The loop is broken, but nothing is promised. Film cannot stop time, Ritual seems to say, but it can accompany someone through it.