Lisa Spilliaert would have struggled to find a greater challenge for her feature debut, premiering this year at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Banana Yoshimioto’s experimental novel from 1990 wrangles with philosophical topics like the nature of translation and love as well as more disturbing topics such as incest and suicide. Subject matter aside, the most challenging aspect of Spilliaert’s adaptation is that it is a silent film, but one unlike most others you will ever watch. The dialogue is always muted, but the soundscape and room tone are ever present. Combined with a 4:3 ratio and an almost pastel colour scheme, at times N.P feels like you’re looking back at archival footage. At others, it feels like a dream on the verge of convulsing into a nightmare.
Taking place over the course of several years, N.P follows Kazami (Clara Spilliaert) and her attempts to translate the 97 stories of fictional author Sarao Takase, who committed suicide before a 98th story could be published. As she becomes increasingly fixated on the translation, she forms relationships with the late author’s children – most significantly, Sui (Mikiko Kawamura), who tells Kazami that her father was also her lover, and now she is currently engaged to her half-brother – with whom she may or may not have a suicide pact. The interactions between Kazami and Sui go from strange to distressing and by the end sadly tragic, a localised chaos ensaring Kazami into a particularly twisted web of relatedness and love.
N.P is undoubtedly the kind of film you read rather than watch – and not just because of the onscreen text, which regularly flashes up with subtitles and extracts that are unnervingly paced. The lack of dialogue generates an uncanny distance between the events on screen and whoever is watching. Your brain will get a fair workout trying to traverse that distance, losing itself in the otherworldly strangeness of what you are seeing. Translation of text is at the core of N.P, and finding your way through the mixture of text and voiceless speech makes for an unexpectedly intoxicating watch.
Spilliaert has planned an adaptation of Yoshimoto’s book for years, but considering her vested interest shows admirable restraint. Rather than losing herself in the intricacies, she manages to construct a detailed, dramatic story rich with detail and style. Spilliaert rides waves of enigma brilliantly, handling everything from the upsetting to the violent in a way that lends a beautiful consistency to the story. She gets great performances out of the whole cast, but especially from Kawamura. Her non-assuming exterior shields a whirlwind character who is unpredictable at best, destructive at her worst.
The subject matter is difficult and taboo, but Spillaert knows better than to go for shock value. Instead, the awe is slower and insidious as you realise not only what has happened, but how the key characters accept and deal with it in their own (sometimes poisonous) ways. N.P is a 60-minute marvel, an absorbing dream-like sensation that burrows down into your brain. By the end, you won’t quite know what to think, but you will be impressed by Spillaert’s tact and style as she brings Yoshimoto’s story to life in as unique a way as you could imagine.
N.P is available to watch here as part of BFMAF until October 11th.