Jennifer Coates at Film Quarterly:
A young woman arrives unannounced at the unresponsive door of a Tokyo apartment belonging to an older relative. She sits down outside and waits. Like the girl herself, the viewer is unsure of her welcome. We know the apartment’s inhabitant to be solitary, taciturn, a person who struggles to communicate and make connections with others. How will she be received? And how will this development impact the protagonists as we follow them through a slice of their lives in Japan’s largest city? These are the identical plot points of two recent films that share a setting but in many other respects could not be more different. To explore how depictions of the lived experience of a range of city spaces are used to drive plot and develop characterization, I use the architectural concept of “habitation” to think beyond buildings and characters’ relationships to those structures, analyzing instead how inhabited spaces incite plot developments and bring characters together, in a trope that I call “habitation as storytelling device.”
Writing about cinema, both academic and popular, has often drawn attention to how mise-en-scène, location, and set design have been used to communicate characters’ inner states.
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