Edition: U.S. / Global

'Hole in the Sky': Deepening a Romance by Painting the Roof

Published: April 7, 2001

If you have ever found yourself trapped in a cheap motel on the edge of a highway in a scrubby landscape where the only things in sight are occasional diesel trucks steaming by, you'll know what it feels like to watch Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's gently somber film, "Hole in the Sky." After awhile, your adrenaline stops pumping, your metabolism slows, and you have the uncomfortable sensation of having time to kill. With so little stimulation, your mind begins to feed on itself, time stretches out, and your senses start picking up peripheral sounds and images. This is life in the slow, slow lane.

The film, which New Directors/ New Films is screening this evening at 9 and tomorrow at noon at the Museum of Modern Art, follows the deepening relationship of two lost souls who seem almost stranded on the edge of the world. Ichio (Susumu Terajima) has for years been the cook in a roadside diner owned by his father, an irresponsible gambler, on the northern island of Hokkaido. One day a young man driving a bright red sports car cruelly abandons his girlfriend, Taeko (Yuriko Kikuchi), there. Left penniless and hungry, Taeko takes shelter in a shack on the property and soon must beg for food. Taking pity on her, Ichio hires her as his assistant, and bit by bit their initially wary relationship softens into something romantic, unfreezing Ichio's locked-up emotions.

Not terribly much happens in the two-hour-plus film. The high point of their blossoming romance may be the day they spend painting the roof of the diner. The movie's most dramatic moment finds Ichio confronting the cad in the red sports car who has returned to the area with a teenage girl he has picked up. But inevitably Taeko decides she must return to her old life, about which we've learned little.

"Hole in the Sky" isn't visually or aurally sharp enough to justify its attenuated pace. Had the film evoked the environment with a hyperreal precision, its awareness of time, place and the weather might have created an emotional landscape intense enough for its atmosphere of lonely solitude to seep into us. Interspersed in the story are flashes from Ichio's father's home movies that bring back memories of the mother who abandoned the family when Ichio was a child. Despite these revelations, which clash with the style of the rest of the film, the main characters remain frustratingly remote.

Only the most patient sponges of melancholy downbeat cinematic atmosphere are likely to endure "Hole in the Sky" without squirming and wondering why the movie had to be so long and feel so empty.


Written, directed and edited by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri; in Japanese, with English subtitles; director of photography, Kiyoaki Hashimoto; music by Akira Matsumoto; art director, Toru Nishimura; produced by Hidetoshi Morimoto, Mayumi Amano and Kazuki Nakamura. Running time: 127 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 9 and tomorrow at noon at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 30th New Directors/ New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film of the Museum of Modern Art.

WITH: Susumu Terajima (Ichio), Yuriko Kikuchi (Taeko), Bunmei Tobayama (Asahi), Syunsuke Sawada (Noboru) and Syunsuke Gondo (Yamazaki).