“Yōkai, the Spirit World”: Catherine Deneuve between two worlds in a film of great poetry

By Xavier Leherpeur

Published on February 25, 2025 at 6:30 p.m.

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Reading time: 1 min.

Drama Review by Eric Khoo, with Catherine Deneuve, Masaaki Sakai, Yutaka Takenouchi (France-Japan, 1h34). In theaters February 26 ★★★★☆

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Claire Emery is an icon of French song. A singer-songwriter whose success has never waned, an ambassador of our culture all over the world. And especially in Japan where the Japanese public has an unwavering admiration for her. Yuzo, an octogenarian who owns all of the idol's albums, is preparing to go and hear her in concert. Merciless, death will come for him just before. But he will not make this final journey alone.

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Where do those who have left us go after their death? Are they gone for good or do they remain by our side, caring and attentive to our pain? Singaporean Eric Khoo, who had already made a Japanese film ("The Flavor of Ramen", 2018), returns to the lands but also to the urban and marine horizons of the Japanese archipelago for this fable of overwhelming serenity on mourning and our quest for acceptance and appeasement. The delicacy of the writing - screenplay, staging - bathes the film in a soft, subtle and reassuring atmosphere. Opting for a distribution that assumes the risk of being summary (fixed shots for the living, more moving frames for the "spirits"), he instead composes a magnificent movement, fluctuating and sensual, between these two territories. A modest and melancholic pitch which is also that of the superb compositions of Jeanne Cherhal, themselves traversed by the ever-living memory of the great female voices of French song. Like another hand reaching out to the beyond.

Everything makes sense with perfect discretion in this fiction devoid of any tearful indecency. One could almost detect a hint of ironic humor of which Catherine Deneuve would be the guardian. Never fooled by the stakes of this "Orphean" character, she distils in the role of this woman discovering her new condition a delicious malice. To say that she excels is an understatement.