Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka (2000) is 3 hours 40 minutes long; but subjectively it felt much shorter to me. That’s because the film is so beautiful, so bleak, and so compelling, that I was drawn into its rhythms, its landscapes, and its world. Eureka is about the aftermath of trauma: the pain of working it through, and the dim, distant possibility of some sort of–I don’t want to say redemption–but coming to terms, and reviving some sort of human connection. Yet it seems inadequate, somehow, to say that this is merely what the film is “about”–I will say, rather, that the film is, and embodies, such a process…
A madman hijacks a bus, and kills most of the passengers. Only three people survive: the bus driver, and a pre-teen brother and sister. The brother and sister lose their parents, and the bus driver’s wife leaves him. The traumatized children stop talking. The bus driver drifts around aimlessly, and finally comes to live with the children. All this is setup–happening in the first ten or twenty minutes of the film. What remains, for the next 3 1/4 hours, is the mostly wordless problem of coming to terms, dealing with survivor’s guilt, learning to exist in the world again.
Eureka is shot in widescreen, and on color film that is so washed out that it appears, for the most part, to be high-contrast black and white. Occasional closeups accompany mostly long shots; the camera seems to wander in a daze, lingering on bleak natural locations, not so much following the characters as idly gliding through a landscape of which they are just insignificant parts. The effect is hallucinatory, as the viewer adapts to the camera’s slowly unfolding rhythms–which is why the film never seems as long as it actually is. The characters are going through a kind of extended numbness or emotional blunting; but the film makes this`blunting into an intensely heightened experience. (Nothing could be further from the disaffected anomie of Antonioni’s films, for instance; even if Aoyama shares with Antonioni a taste for carefully articulated visual compositions, long takes and long shots in which nothing much happens).
The soundtrack is sparse. There isn’t much conversation. Occasionally someone plays the radio, or tunrs on the TV. Non-diegetic music is reserved for special moments of emotional heightening.
The film starts in the small town where the busjacking takes place. About halfway through, Eureka turns into a sort of road movie, as the bus driver takes the children (and their college-age uncle) on a ride in a refurbished van through a succession of bleak landscapes, They are looking, the bus driver says, for a way to “start over.” But really they are travelling through time, rather than space.Their restless voyaging without any fixed goal is a way of traversing time: the time that can either exacerbate wounds or heal them, but that is in any case necessary for change.
So there are lots of shots of the van driving down an empty road, or of the characters wandering to the side of a cliff, to the seashore, through a field of cows, up a mountain path, or through the empty nighttime streets of some provinical town. It is with and through such shots that we the viewers are drawn into the temporal rhythms of festering wounds, but also (perhaps) of healing. The whole film is shot through with apocalyptic forebodings that never come to realization–the sense that the horrors the characters survive at the start of the film is only the harbinger of something worse. That “something worse,” fortunately, never arrives. But that is because the film empties out any sense of the present: past and future–the memory of trauma, on one hand, and the anticipation of imminent catastrophe, on the other–are the real contents or subjects of the film.
So Eureka is a film about remembering and anticipating. It is painful, as remembrance and anticipation often are. If it offers a glimmer of hope, when we finally get to the end of the story (since, for all its detours and waitings, it is still a story), then this glimmer of hope is earned, precisely because it is not “redemptive.” That is to say, the film insists that nothing can erase or efface, or somehow compensate for, the experience of traumatic loss. The slim hope it offers does not negate this loss, but exists only in the acknowledgement that such loss can never be made good. It’s a way of moving on, I suppose, but a “moving on” that is unable to forget the tragedy it seeks to move on from. And all this is expressed, less by anything overtly narrated or thematized by the film, than by the way it inscribes time and space.