To the extent in which it deals with the relationship between art and life, Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s “All around us” can be seen as a supplement and a counterpoint to Takeshi Kitano’s “Achilles and the tortoise”.

Kitano’s focus on Machisu’s attempts to become a painter by selling his artwork lacks the melodramatic framing that constitutes Ryosuke’s approach to the story of Kanao and Shoko*, with a close attention to human relationships that makes art and painting perform the role of a subtle and delicate subtext about feelings and emotions.

In Kitano’s film, art and painting come to the forefront and human relationships become a subtext which comments the very emptiness, in late capitalism, of the zone of indetermination which connects art and life by making both the same**.

In Ryosuke’s film, we walk through the domains of art and life as two separate, however linked, spaces and times: the work and the home, for Kanao (and in another way for Shoko as well); the time of sorrow and the time of rebirth, for Shoko (and somehow for Kanao as well). The links between art and life become the fabric which, slowly interweaven, ends up reconstituting the couple’s common world, their being together as a process of becoming.

*This lack of melodramatic framing ends up being also an enabling feature of Kitano’s film.

**Check out my review of Kitano’s film: http://www.theauteurs.com/films/20684