Devastatingly beautiful choices in ‘Plan 75’
THE irony is not lost to the audience: a nation that has a record number of old men and women is now proposing through cinema a systematic process of doing away with them. Dubbed Plan 75, a reference to the cut-off age for the aged willing to enroll in the said program, the film is an acute summing up of what happens to a graying society that is Japan. But what could have been an incipient cold depiction of dystopia (think Soylent Green) becomes linked verses of compassion for a humanity that persists.
Chie Hayakawa, the filmmaker behind Plan 75, does not waste any time to tell us how the world of the Japanese has quickly turned upside down. The film opens with an annihilation.
For the non-japanese audience, the scenes that follow the violent opening could have appeared strange and exotic: two old women are briskly working in a hotel, and their efficiency would put to shame any other woman younger than them. But that is the truth in Japan. Old women and men have formed the labor force in this phenomenal economic system, where the so-called dangerous, dirty and difficult jobs are given to foreign workers and, by default, to those who have no clear options for employment.
Later, the two women are seen with the other women. They look old; they ARE old. But they are tough workers, an unapologetically active part of the working class. They disperse later and the camera tracks one of them. She goes home to her small place. Inside, life vibrant goes on. She cuts her nails and, after gathering them on a piece of paper, drops them into her plants—dead tissues into living organisms. Nothing goes to waste in this society.
To these old women, Plan 75 has become a fact. Not a warning. The backstory to the population crisis in Japan is the historical fact that these old men and women now on their way out were the same men and women whose sense of the gaman (obstinacy and industry) composed the generation that built the industrial giant named Japan. To these old inhabitants belonged the tradition that saw the nation as an ie, a house. They, however, have become unnecessary. They have become the “plan.”
And precisely because the old women and men of Japan have always shown their capacity for sacrifice that they are now at the center of this narrative, which is a tribute to them as well as a muted critique of their society. There is also a historical antecedent to the aged being thrown away, discarded. This was the notion of “ubasute,” long held a legend involving senicide, where the aged are brought to remote sites up on the mountains and leaving them there to die.
If Plan 75 had simply been that—the discard of humanity—then it would have been a dry-as-dust thesis of modernization. The plan, however, comes from a society of feeling people. In a comic twist of the Japanese discussing resorts and vacations, the old women huddle and talk of the benefits of knowing when to die. The final days are spent with good food in a lovely place. But Hayakawa knows dying is as complex as living even if one is given a plan. She includes in the story young men and women, putting back in the frame what has been missing all this time, all this life—the family and the love concealed behind such a human invention.
Kinship, in the film, offers a way out of death that is so artificial because it has been made certain, and therefore not human.
With a gripping screenplay (written by Hayakawa based on her story and Jason Gray), Plan 75 takes your breath away. Credit for the power of the film should also be given to its actors who are so charismatic they make their angst ever closer to ours. Stefanie Arianne, the Filipino-japanese actress, holds the screen with the presence of the ordinary. She gathers all the tensions in her body and presents to us a warmth necessary in a room of corpses yielding earthly treasures. Yumi Kawaii is the call center agent whose last call to the old woman she knows is leaving her home for the last time is sadness distilled in powerlessness. As the young man directly working for the Plan, Hayato Isomura knows what they do with the ashes after cremation. Saving his uncle from the government crematorium, he is the shred of hope we thought the matter-of-fact bleakness of this film will never provide. If we are to shed tears, however, they are not for these old people but for the young looking at a future similarly misbegotten.
To the Filipino audience, the actor who plays the lead—the woman living alone who, towards the end, gifts us with a horizon that fortunately beholds not the last sunset—may seem just another old thespian. She is not; she is Chieko Baisho, an icon in Japan, having acted as Sakura in the long-running series Otoko wa tsurai yo (It is tough being a man). In Plan 75, Baisho becomes everywo/man, a representation of a weathered but gallant humanity. The singer-actress does not so much fill the screen as she vanquishes it with those eyes that see the realities but are too brave to surrender to them.
For those who were disappointed they were not able to use their hankies during dramatic moments, do not despair. Chie Hayakawa’s sense of drama is also her sense of hope. Humans, after all, will live through projects to calendar deaths in a world where life itself escapes predictability.
I urge you to watch Plan 75 for its artistic achievement that is also its triumph in truth-telling. The film is produced by Loaded Films, Urban Factory, Happinet-phantom Studios Dongyu Club, WOWOW, Fusee, and released through TBA Studios in the Philippines.