Desert of Namibia (Yamanaka Yoko, 2024)

A slightly different version of this was originally published at InReview Online as part of their coverage of the Museum of the Moving Image's 2025 First Look series.

At first, Yamanaka Yoko’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what I’m calling Millennium Mambo–core, after the growing yet too-belated canonization of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 classic. Beautiful yet disaffected youths stumbling through romantic hardships in a drug- and electronic music-fueled haze of East Asian metropoles. But as it unfolds, it reveals something much more psychologically complex than simple urban alienation, building on Yamanaka’s promising 2017 debut Amiko (she’s made only short films and television since then) and raising the question of just how unlikeable a beautiful woman can be before her friends and lovers (and the audience) turn completely against her.

Yuumi Kawai plays Kana, a 21 year old who works at a laser hair-removal place and lives with her boyfriend Honda. He’s a Mr. Sensitive Pony-Tail Man, a genuinely nice guy who takes care of her when she comes home drunk from the club. She is, of course, also sleeping with another guy, Hayashi (Kaneko Daichi), and before too long, Kana manufactures a break-up with Honda (making him think it’s all his fault) and moves in with Hayashi. They fight, often, and Kana becomes increasingly abusive (there is pushing and wrestling, but he mostly just defends himself and tries to keep her from hurting either of them). As she becomes increasingly irrational, she sees a therapist (sort of), begins to disassociate and hallucinate, and meets (in her imagination most likely) Erika Karata, the Asako I & II star whose real-life career was derailed when it was discovered she had been having an affair with her married costar Higashide Masahiro. 

The question is: why does Kana behave the way she does? Yamanaka proposes a number of possible answers, none of which are quite satisfactory. Does she suffer from bipolar or borderline personality disorder? Is she so deeply guilty about her affair that it can only be expressed through self-destructive (and boyfriend-destructive) behavior? Are society’s depilatory expectations for women to blame? In the film’s striking opening scene, Kana meets an old friend from school at a coffee shop. As the two discuss the shocking suicide of a girl they used to know, Yamanaka pipes in the sound of a conversation of a table of young men sitting nearby. As Kana and her friend talk about their deceased acquaintance (how and why she may have done it) with all the detachment of youth, their conversation is repeatedly interrupted by the boys talking about a “no-panties hot pot restaurant”, a dining establishment where the waitresses go commando under their skirts and the floors are all mirrors (recalling Sono Sion’s Love Exposure, in which surreptitiously obtained upskirt photography is played as goofy and innocent fun but which plays less as satire and more as self-revealingly sinister as multiple accusations of sexual abuse against Sono have become public). Irrational destruction may be the sanest course of action in such a world.

But even that’s too simple an explanation. While they’re camping (in Kana’s mind?) Karata proposes to Kana that she’s actually happy on the inside, despite her destructive actions. She lists off for her a series of animals with contradictory names, a jellyfish is not a fish, etc; the implication being that Kana too can’t be labeled, that maybe she’d be better off if she felt bad about her lying and cheating and fighting, or if she was given a medical diagnosis that explained away all her contradictions. They then proceed to jump over and through the campfire, a metaphor for growing up if ever there was one. Throughout the movie, Kana watches on her phone a livestream of a watering hole, presumably in the eponymous Namib, where animals congregate for a friendly drink (like a coffee shop but without the obnoxious men). The movie ends in this place of calm where maybe Kana, in a final phrase of non-understanding, has finally come to accept and understand her own contradictions.