Kana (Kawai Yumi), the protagonist of Desert of Namibia, doesn’t feel the emotions demanded of her in a society that measures her worth in relation to men. We first see the young laser hair-removal technician in a relationship with Honda (Kanichiro), who treats her as a dependent and for whom she feels no love. Her mother is Chinese, but, having grown up in Japan, Kama speaks only a few words of her mother’s native tongue, aggravating her sense of alienation. When she meets Hayashi (Kaneko Daichi), she leaves Honda to be with him, but the new relationship quickly sours and she finds herself as caged as before.
While Kana’s predicament renders her sympathetic, her talents for self-destruction and manipulation make for a claustrophobic perspective to be aligned with as an audience. Through her kinetic, mesmerizing performance, Kawai expresses with every muscle in her body Kana’s hairpin swerves from the apathetic to the apoplectic. A tenuous smile escapes through her mask of disaffection only rarely, as when others comment on her physical beauty. But it’s a bitter satisfaction—fleeting, empty. For much of Yamanaka Yoko’s film, Kana seems as opaque to herself as she is to us, until her recurrent, futile conflicts with Hayashi force her to look inward.
In one scene, Kana leaves her phone on the couch with a video playing and exits the frame. The camera slowly zooms in, close enough that we can almost discern what’s on screen. Only in the closing credits is the video revealed to show two oryxes listlessly circling a dwindling watering hole. This eponymous desert is an apt image of Kana’s interiority, where emotion is as scarce as water—until the rainy season comes, when it turns to an uncontrollable flood.
When a male therapist of Kana’s posits either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder over a video call, the film stops just short of diagnosing her. Even so, this risks reducing her to a cluster of symptoms as opposed to a character with agency, and blunting Desert of Namibia’s social critique, already subtle to the point of seeming tentative. Debatably, she’s able to slip through the ambiguous chink of that “or,” if not misogynist misdiagnosis. But when another therapist (Yuzumi Shintani), a woman this time, dangles a traumatic origin story for her illness, the film’s dramatic tension begins to deflate. Whether this tonal shift in the third act signals a step toward self-awareness or resignation on Kana’s part remains undecidable.
“Hello” and “I don’t understand” are the only Chinese phrases that Kana seems to remember. Innocuous as it may sound, this second phrase takes on particular significance by being the film’s last line of dialogue. Desert of Namibia comes full circle from one stalemate to another. After all she’s suffered, Kana apparently lacks a greater understanding of the society she lives in or the troubles in her mind, let alone any connection between them. Kawai’s performance is arresting, in part, because she embodies a flurry of constant movement that goes nowhere, escaping into an endless succession of traps. The film is so welded to Kana’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.
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