Netherlands Production Platform - Nederlands Film Festival

Lonely Woman
Artémis Productions
Belgium
Writer/director Stefan Liberski
Producer Patrick Quinet
14 • NPP 2008
Synopsis
On occasion, Martin Laumann has to go to
Japan to meet a client. One day, his wife
Elsa decides not only to go with him but to
precede him and travel on her own for a
couple of weeks. Martin encourages her to
do it but, when he arrives at the hotel in
Osaka, Elsa is nowhere to be found.
As the film opens, Elsa is living out her
newfound solitude. She experiences her
self, alone, through being an alien. One
night, she sees an outrageous truck,
bristling with metal spikes and blinking with
multicoloured lights. It is a Dekotora (Dekotoras
are customised trucks found in Japan.
Their drivers and owners are members of
brotherhoods that organise meetings and
contests.) Seeing that truck, poised like a
UFO, Elsa is intrigued, as if she were being
lured to travel into another dimension.
She meets Eiji, a Belgian-Japanese
video artist. They become friends. Elsa’s
interest in Dekotoras piques Eiji’s curiosity.
He suggests making a video about travelling
across Japan in a Dekotora. With Eiji, Elsa
discovers an unusual facet of Japan and the
still vivid remnants of a bygone past. She is
attracted to the young man.
At this point, we go through sequences
of lives dreamed up by Elsa: she is a housewife,
with an ordinary husband and a kid in
a school uniform. Then she is working on
the assembly line in a Tokyo chocolate factory,
alongside a team of white-clad women.
Then she is sitting in her tiny apartment…
These visions of a ‘Japanese Elsa’ interweave
with scenes depicting the consequences
of her absence from Europe,
where Martin has contacted a private detective
to find his wife.
Elsa, Eiji and Naoki (the Dekotora truck
driver whom Eiji has hired) are riding in the
Dekotora, with Eiji taping. On the outskirts of
Fukuchiyama, Elsa and Eiji attend a big
Dekotora meet. The huge gathering, the
thunderous noise, the bizarre procession of
garish trucks, the hordes of video cam-toting
spectators all end up disgusting Elsa.
She loses interest in the project.
That night, a traumatic, long forgotten
memory comes back to her in a dream. In
the ryokan where they are staying, Elsa and
Eiji make love. Very early the next morning,
she goes for a walk and sees a woman waving
her kids goodbye as they go off to
school. Elsa waves back at her. The woman
looks at her for a moment, then waves at her
too, as if they were complicit.
Back at the ryokan, Elsa packs up her
things and walks out, leaving a note for Eiji,
and takes a bus to Osaka. She has decided
to go home. She finds herself in a mountain
village where one of those ancient celebrations
of the equinox is taking place. Elsa
wanders by herself in the dark and incomprehensible
limbo of this forsaken village.
Suddenly, a man yells out her name. It is
Martin. She smiles at him and takes his
wrists in her hands. “Yes,” she says.
On the bus, Elsa wakes up. Through the
window, she sees a red sun rising over the
Japanese countryside. The detective’s
rental car stops in front of a police station.
They hesitate. Eiji makes to get out. The
detective stops him and starts the car.
Director’s statement
In its broken-up structure, Lonely Woman
mixes present (and real-life) sequences on
Elsa’s trip with imaginary ones from her fantasised,
‘new’ life.
The contents of the scenes of this
dreamed future are divided into two moods:
the first one has to do with Elsa’s desire, the
other her guilt. On the one hand, there is the
desire for Japan; on the other, guilt about the
people (and the world) she has left behind.
Elsa wants to be alone to face otherness.
She plunges into Japanese foreignness
in the hope of encountering herself. As
always, this means finding the distance, the
divide and a new relationship between the
self and others (or the Other).
I would like to film Lonely Woman on HD
video with a small crew so that I can also
capture everyday life in Japan. In that country,
daily life has its own unique shape and
abundant extravagance in ordinary things
that I would like to include in the film’s
atmosphere and aesthetics.