Matsumura Shingo's 'Between Us' Mends a Friendship Through Distance, Not Dialogue

Director Matsumura Shingo's new film "Between Us" is playing in the Tokyo International Film Festival's Nippon Cinema Now section, and it builds its entire emotional engine on what its characters refuse to say. The story follows Makoto and Kasumi, childhood best friends who drift apart after an incident on a joint family camping trip, then reunite six years later in their high school drama club.

Kawashima Ririka, Kurasawa Anna, Kikuchi Akiko, Usuda Asami, Saito Yoichiro and Miura Takahiro star. The script leaves gaps on purpose. Patient camerawork absorbs the emotional information each character tries to withhold.

Matsumura, whose credits include "The Lump in My Heart" (2023), has set himself a hard rule: no handheld camerawork, ever.

"All the cameras are becoming all compact right now, and you see all these videos shown on YouTube and social media that are shot by those cameras," he says. "And so I wanted to differentiate what I show on the big screen with that kind of content. That is one of the reasons why. The second reason is that I want to capture the emotion of the actors truthfully, slowly."

How do you film two people apart who still feel each other?

That's the film's central mechanism. The drama club has already lost members because Kasumi takes it too seriously for others to keep up. Even after Makoto joins, the two girls are often shot far apart. Matsumura turns emotional distance into literal distance through the blocking (the planned positioning of actors within a scene).

"What was more difficult to portray was [that] though they are apart, they are feeling the existence of the other," Matsumura says. "And I wanted to show that with the use of the eyes and use of the space: though there was a physical space [between them], they kind of had each other in mind."

The repair comes through a simple editing decision. Matsumura cuts the girls' separate script read-throughs as if they were trading lines. Each cut brings them closer, even though they're never in the same room. The play Kasumi discovers — the one that gives the film its title — becomes the vehicle for saying what real life won't allow.

"The play is a fiction, but they are speaking in their own language," he says. "And by saying their lines, they are able to say what they were not able to say in the real world, and by doing that, their distance becomes closer."

What does the story have to do with disaster?

The intimate two-hander has big-picture origins. Matsumura traces the idea to a run of crises starting with the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, then the pandemic and ongoing wars.

"It was a period in my life when I thought it is impossible for one to connect with others," he says. "So I just wanted to make a very simple film with two people, two human beings facing the other way, and to make them look at each other, and [ask] what kind of energy is born from that?"

The plot shares nothing literal with those events, he stresses. The link is that both are "unresolved." He sees a parallel in how media attention works: "The earthquake, the nuclear power plant, the war, if it's on the media, we look into it. But once it's not on the news, we feel that it's kind of in the past solved, but it's really not in reality."

He gave his two leads no specific direction. "They have interest in others, and they listen to others closely, and they take in their words and make it their own," he says. "It was very natural for them to actually perform these two characters, and I just let them freely perform what they felt like."

What does this change for Japanese cinema?

Matsumura reads "Between Us" as part of a broader shift. "There is really no [singular] mainstream in the Japanese cinema now," he says. Budgets are the constraint — "it's not like in the U.S." — and that limits what concepts a single film can carry.

He frames the limit as productive rather than purely restrictive: "Each of us are all making films about [a] variety of small subjects."

His own next move remains open. "I could follow my instinct and make an artistic film, and express what is inside of me, or I could make a film for the mass audience — I won't be facing with myself, but I'll be facing more towards society or the audience that watches the film," he says. "I don't know which way I'll go, as of now."