Winner of the New Current Award at the Busan International Film Festival, the Jury Award of the 2020 Pingyao International Film Festival edition and an official selection at Berlinale, Yujiro Harumoto’s second feature film, A Balance, is currently part of the the third ACA Cinema Project series. The New Films from Japan programme, is organised as part of a “Japan Film Overseas Expansion Enhancement Project” in collaboration with the IFC Center and Visual Industry Promotion Organization.
The film focuses on the existential conflict of a woman who works as a documentary director. She finds herself reporting on the true-life scandal about a student-teacher relationship, and eventually experiences the very issue firsthand, along with its fraught societal consequences.
Filmmaker Yuko (Kumi Takiuchi), is working on a documentary about a news case: the suicide of Hiromi, a student who committed suicide after being bullied for her alleged relationship with a professor of the music institute she attended. Yuko’s uncompromising investigative work earns her the trust of the families of the victims she interviews, and brings her into conflict with the management of her broadcaster, who wants a more sellable version. Yuko deals with heinous events, working for a morbid and cynical media system that is often in search of a sensationalistic villain to make headlines. However, her drive is an unsullied quest for authenticity, that she stubbornly pursues, managing to gain the confidence of her interviewees who agree to speak to her on camera.
But at her expense, she will discover that it is not always easy to remain impartial. Her idealism is mocked by destiny that puts her at a crossroads. Yuko confronts a situation identical to the story she is working on, but places her in the position of having to cover up a sex scandal involving her closest family member. Besides being a reporter, Yuko works as a teacher in a cram school run by her father, Mr. Kinoshita (Ken Mitsuishi). Together they train students to achieve particular goals. One of their pupils, Mei (Kumi Takiuchi) confesses to her that she is pregnant after sleeping with Yuko’s dad. The young girl has no one to turn to, not even her abusive father, Tetsuya Obata (Masahiro Umeda).
In this thorny affair the incorruptible reporter struggles in her decision-making. Yuko has always dissected the world through the lens of her camera and her righteousness. She uses her smartphone as a weapon of rectitude, holding it up in front of the people she wants to question to obtain the unvarnished truth. But when she discovers the abominable act carried out by her father she is torn between ethics and storge. “The Balance” she seeks is between her role as a nonpartisan documentarian and an active player in changing the narrative in favour of her progenitor. In these regards, A Balance puts into question the status of the figure of the storyteller, who has always held integrity as her guiding principle and starts to falter when fate puts her in the position of judging the same situation from a personal angle.
The legal drama, initiates a trial that unravels outside the court rooms, but within the conscience of its protagonist. Yujiro Harumoto leads the narration on two parallel stories that mirror each other in content, but are juxtaposed in perspective. The thin line that separates work ethics and familial love, slowly becomes a blur for Yuko, who has to find out what direction to adopt.
Harumoto’s film makes relativism a paradigm of society, as an entity that is always ready to manipulate factuality to its convenience. Objectivity gets warped, moulded and reshaped according to what is more opportune.
A Balance, thus underlines how it is easy to be judgmental as opposed to understanding, and how moral principles are easy to be applied until one falls down the rabbit hole of error and accepts the fallibility of mankind. As Yuko says at one point “What’s moral isn’t always what’s best.”
Final Grade: B—