‘All the Lovers in the Night’ Cannes Review: A Woman Nobody Sees

Accustomed to solitude, to the concentration and silence of chosen work, Fuyuko lives in near-total withdrawal from the world. Her only regular contacts are a former schoolmate who does the same job and the woman who assigns her manuscripts — people she sees only occasionally. The rest of her time, including her birthday, which falls on December 24th, she spends alone: at home working, or walking through Tokyo, preferably at night.

Fuyuko Irie (Yukino Kishii) is a freelance copy editor who can go months barely leaving her apartment, moving carefully through the manuscripts sent her way. But this isn’t entirely a life she has chosen. It soon becomes clear that she longs for more contact with others, with the world — she just doesn’t know how to reach it. Shy and withdrawn, sociability is plainly not among her strengths.

All the Lovers in the Night is a film about Fuyuko’s efforts to break out of a kind of self-imposed confinement and the difficulty of doing so. Adapted from the award-winning novel by Mieko Kawakami, Sode’s film offers something like a precise vivisection of a solitary woman’s life — the kind of woman who doesn’t draw attention to herself and wouldn’t know how. When she spends time with Hijiri (Misato Morita), her editor, or with Noriko (Mai Fukagawa), a colleague, Fuyuko glimpses other possible lives: one seems glamorous and full of romantic adventures, the other is married with a child. But she doesn’t know how to be part of any of that. She has always been someone who goes unnoticed.

What helps her, at least initially, to lower some of her defenses is alcohol. Fuyuko starts drinking casually after a friend tells her she deserves it after finishing a long and difficult book — and then she can’t stop. Her small daily water bottle is usually full of sake. In one of her drunken ventures, she goes to a cultural center to sign up for a poetry class and falls ill. There she is helped by Mitsutsuka (Tadanobu Asano), a physics teacher considerably older than her, with whom she begins meeting regularly at a café. Fuyuko is captivated by his explanations — particularly everything related to how light reflects off matter and moves through the world. And suddenly the world opens up a little.

The thematic connection is obvious, but no less moving for it: Fuyuko is the kind of person who projects very little light outward, who barely reflects back to others. The film is about that particular mode of femininity — or, more broadly, of personality — and the way it shapes both how people see themselves and how they are seen. Through scattered flashbacks, Sode gestures at the experiences that might explain the protagonist’s fears and isolation, reinforced by an interior narration in voice-over — strangely delivered in a male voice rather than her own.

All the Lovers in the Night has all the hallmarks of a Japanese literary drama rooted in internationally acclaimed source material: delicate, elegant, quietly melancholic. Fuyuko’s relationship with Mitsutsuka may or may not qualify as a love story, but it gives her something she has rarely known — the feeling of being sought out, appreciated, perhaps respected. She still has to drink to get herself there (she confesses she couldn’t open her mouth otherwise), but what she mostly does is listen to him talk, or watch him sketch his explanations of how light behaves among particles.

A restrained drama that explores one woman’s life and, through it, the lives of those around her, All the Lovers in the Night finds unexpected human connections and refuses the idea of romantic love as salvation. Through contact with another, the film’s insistent metaphor suggests, light stops being a point and becomes a wave — spreading outward through the world. Here, now, or in the most distant galaxy.