They Say Nothing Stays the Same: Meditative Character Study Both Elusive and Affecting

By Karen Gordon

Rating: B

Popular Japanese actor and musician Joe Odagiri adds another creative achievement to his already impressive career with his directorial debut. They Say Nothing Stays the Same is a deceptively simple, slow-moving film that takes its time in revealing its layers.

Akira Emoto plays Toichi, an older man who ekes out a living as a boatman, ferrying people across the river in a simple wooden boat. He lives alone, just above the shoreline in a bare, subsistence shack with very little to his name.

Changes are coming for him, though. A big steel bridge is being built just a bit upstream from where he lives that will wipe out his already meagre earnings.

For a long time, Toichi is a mystery. When he’s not attending to his boat, or fishing for dinner, he sits quietly on the shore, waiting for passengers, staring out at the beautiful natural scenery, but not revealing much about what he’s thinking or feeling. He has one friend Genzo (Nijiro Murakami), a younger man who visits often, bringing food and providing a bit of comic relief.

When passengers come, Toichi puts a big smile on his face, so that he’s almost unrecognizable, and no matter whether they’re friendly or rude, he seems to mostly stay detached, rowing them slowly and carefully across the river.

Then one day, he finds an injured teenaged girl (Ririka Kawashima) in the water and takes her back to his shack to try and heal her. A few days later he hears gossip about a bloody murder of a family in a nearby town, except for one child, who is missing and may have been kidnapped.

But did the event even happen?

On the surface, the presence of the girl — who is as silent as her rescuer, and as guarded and unreadable — doesn’t seem to change much about Toichi. But slowly, Odagiri, who also wrote the script, starts to reveal more about him, mostly through scenes that might be dreams or revenge fantasies or even memories. As well, from time to time, he sees a ghostly figure: a young woman who seems to be admonishing him.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Nature plays a big role in the film. Odagiri and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle focus on the beauty of the natural world around Toichi: the river, the forest, the birds, and fish. The film is visually beautiful and evocative. This is the world that Toichi lives in, but if you look downstream, it’s a world that has existed for millennia. Upstream, you see the intrusion of progress, in the form of a steel bridge going up.

The narrative itself is less clear. With its meditative pace, use of magical realism, and characters that don’t really reveal much about themselves, the film is a mix of things: part character study, part mystery, part allegory, part social commentary. In other words, it goes in several different directions at once, and not all are resolved.

The anchor here is Toichi. Despite being silent and somewhat expressionless, Emoto gives a strong and focused performance that fastens the film in a way that is most clear in the final scenes.

Odagiri doesn’t give us many answers. They Say Nothing Stays the Same is enigmatic and, in some ways, frustratingly elusive, yet also affecting.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same. Written and directed by Joe Odagiri. Starring Akira Emoto, Ririka Kawanshima and Nijiro Murakami. Opening in select theatres plus VOD and digital November 12.