The Parade Goes On

Isao Yukisada seems to be coming back to the themes of his earlier films with 2010's Parade, based on a novel by Shuichi Yoshida. 

At first Parade seems like a quirky comedy or slice of life with four characters of increasingly differing backgrounds living together in an apartment, an L'Auberge Japonais if you will, with Audrey Tautou and her ilk replaced by capable Japanese equivalents.

Once a fifth member, Satoru (played adeptly by Kento Hayashi) quietly slips into the picture, we realize that all this is merely superficial. As a person on the outside looking in, Satoru unravels the strange relationships between the four main characters. Structured as point of view segments, the apartment tenants go about their rather mundane rhythms, each segment ending with a character revealing a hidden truth about themselves. These truths range from dark childhood pasts to inexplicable feelings of hollowness, loneliness or isolation.

There are a lot of truths behind Parade's Friends-like artifice and they are at times stacked one on top of another. The truth that you can never really know someone is compounded with the truth that maybe people know you better than you think - they just don't mind all the skeletons in your closet.

What the film hides behind its structure proves to be quite disturbing. For me it stems from the extent to which the social harmony must be preserved, even though the definition of that harmony grows ever stranger. It's a phenomenon that is not unique to Japan, but it is one that is exacerbated by the country's group-centric culture, as well as its notions of honne, one's true self, and tatemae, the self one shows outwardly in society.

The last shot of Parade is static with all our characters in one frame, punctuated by an invitation ("aren't you joining us?"). It's a meaning that can either be taken in the context of the dialogue, or something completely different: an invitation to (re)join the tenants' parade on a road paved with their own social facades.