Crew
Director/Screenplay – Sion Sono, Producers – Izumi Sono, Sion Sono & Takeshi Suzuki, Photography – Hideo Yamamoto, Production Design – Takeshi Suzuki. Production Company – Nikkatsu/Sion Production.
Cast
Megumi Kagurazaka (Yoko Suzuki), Kenji Endo, Yuto Ikeda, Koko Mori
Plot
Yoko Suzuki is an android that has a job working for the Space Postal Service where she delivers packages to the farthest human-inhabited planets of the galaxy.
Japanese director Shion Sono has become an increasingly interesting name since the early 2000s. Sono first gained attention with his tenth film, the modest hit of Suicide Club (2002) and went onto its sequel Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005). Over the next few years, Sono has made a number of other genre films, including the perversely disturbed Strange Circus (2005); Exte: Hair Extensions (2007) about killer hair extensions; Cold Fish (2010) about serial killings, tropical fish salesman and the reclamation of male pride; Guilty of Romance (2011) about sexual fulfilment and murder; Himizu (2011) about murderous children; Tokyo Tribe (2014), a near-future film about gangland wars where much of the dialogue is delivered in rap; The Land of Hope (2012) set in an alternate world; Love and Peace (2015), a romance involving talking animals; the reality blurring Tag (2015); the comedy The Virgin Psychics (2015); Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017) and The Forest of Love (2019), as well as non-genre items such as the gangster film Hazard (2005), the sexual drama Love Exposure (2008) and the hilarious Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (2013) and the post-apocalyptic English language Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021).
The Whispering Star was the first occasion Sion Sono had made an SF film – technically, Tokyo Tribe had a future setting, but Sono lacked much interest in its depiction. By contrast, The Whispering Star is a full spacegoing SF film. It is also a film where the central character is an Android who spends the film reflecting on life.
Expectedly in Sion Sono’s hands, The Whispering Star is anything but a regular SF film. It is about an intergalactic delivery service but there is nothing in common with a similar film like Space Truckers (1996). The spaceship itself looks like a detached house travelling through space with two rocket engines on the back – it even comes with a porch and front door! And unlike say Ex Machina (2015), which came out several months earlier in the same year, Sono has little interest in depicting the soul of the android and what it means to be a machine. (For all the character is an android, Yoko seems a very human one who catches a cold at one point. She is also an android that appears to be powered by about a dozen AA batteries!!!)
In fact, it is quite a scratch of the head to pinpoint exactly what The Whispering Star is about. It has a very non-commercial pace. It consists of frequently long and static shots where not much happens. We just watch android Megumi Kagurazaka (who is Sion Sono’s wife in real life) on the ship going about the monotony of life – making a cup of tea, doing the dusting, cleaning the floors, removing moths from the overhead light and listening to the tapes either she (or maybe one of her predecessors) has recorded about life on board. If nothing else, The Whispering Star is a film that does a fine job in depicting the tedium of a long-distance space mission.
Title cards with days of the week appear on screen at random times, while the opening is filled with the ship’s A.I. monotonously and repetitively listing trajectory coordinates. Later Yoko develops a fascination with opening the packages she has to deliver and seeing what is inside, finding banally random items such as a cigarette butt, a few frames of film, a paint easel, a preserved butterfly, a pencil, a fishhook, a paper cup and a childhood photo. Later she meets a man tells her how he has developed the habit of walking with a squished soft drink can trapped on his shoe and so she spends a number of scenes walking down empty streets with a can attached to her foot. Nothing much really happens in the plot, just the peculiar observation of Megumi Kagurazaka’s life, before the film reaches an end. The impression you get of The Whispering Star is of a film that has less adherence to the hard SF spacegoing film and more to the Surrealist tradition.
One of the strangest parts of the film is when Megumi Kagurazaka arrives at the various planets of her destination. In all cases, it looks as though these are long-deserted places with abandoned and collapsed buildings, empty streets, overturned cars and people seemingly living among the ruins. In this instance, Shion Sono went and filmed in the exclusion zones around the Namie district of Fukushima, which have been evacuated and left deserted following the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. It leaves you with a peculiar sense of human having spread out to colonise the galaxy, builds towns and then just abandoned them altogether.
Trailer here