Review | Cannes 2022: Plan 75 movie review – Japan’s ageist social mores reconsidered in harrowing yet humane drama, a feature-length expansion from Ten Years Japan
- Director Chie Hayakawa’s film about how over-75s are given a choice to end their lives for ‘perks’ offers a hard-hitting critique of a cold, pragmatic society
- With its subtle screenplay and matching performances from its brilliant cast, Plan 75 has done Japanese cinema proud at Cannes 2022
4/5 stars
A subgenre of films has long existed about the murder of old people as an act of social control: Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976), for example, or the two versions of The Ballad of Narayama by Keisuke Kinoshita (1957) and Shohei Imamura (1983). But Plan 75 offers something different.
Eschewing the settings of a dystopic future or a distant past, Japanese director Chie Hayakawa’s first feature unfolds in a very recognisable and relatable here and now, as pensioners are coaxed into signing up for euthanasia as a final and dignified contribution to society.
Dressing up her fantastical scenario without hardly the faintest of sensationalist melodrama, Hayakawa has delivered something at once harrowing in its ambience, humane at its core and hard-hitting in its critique against the ageist mores of a cold, pragmatic society.
With its subtle screenplay and matching performances from its brilliant cast, Plan 75 has done Japanese cinema proud as the only Japan-set film to feature in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
The Asian movies premiering at the Cannes Film Festival 2022
Expanding that short film into a full-length feature, Hayakawa has chosen to tackle this premise from three perspectives, with the main protagonist being Michi (Chieko Baisho), a lonely septuagenarian contemplating the plan while she earns a decent living for herself as a chambermaid.
Hiromu (Hayato Isomura) is a career civil servant dedicated to selling the plan to the elderly, his gentle demeanour helping to provide the state-sanctioned mass-murder project an appealing human face. And watching all this unfold from the sidelines is Maria (Stefanie Arianne), a Filipino migrant worker tasked with cleaning up the aftermath of the assisted suicides.
At first, Michi and her friends would jokingly discuss the so-called perks – how to spend the “preparatory grant” given to them, or how to choose between the different “packages” on offer. Hiromu also treats his work as a natural way of life, showing the same diligence and care he shows towards his other assignments.
But this germane veneer eventually cracks, as Michi becomes increasingly helpless because of the loss of her friends, her job and even her apartment. Hiromu also unravels as he meets an estranged uncle and learns of the hard times he (and his generation) has fallen into after spending his life building – literally – the foundations of modern Japanese society.
More a supporting character, Maria is nevertheless part of perhaps Plan 75’s most striking scene: as she clears and organises the possessions left behind by the deceased, it’s hard not to sense its devastating parallels with images of those warehouses of loot stripped from murdered Jewish inmates in Nazi death camps.
Here, just as throughout the film, Hayakawa implies rather than explains, and this tactfulness instils Plan 75 with the power one expects of a bitter denunciation for our troubling times.
