QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Opening with a scene of an onmyōji, or exorcist, accidentally raising the spirit of a very appetitive, soul-devouring bear, writer and director Katsutoshi Furuya’s MieMie – She Can See sets itself up to be an effects-heavy fantasy, and in many ways, that is what it remains – but it is also a cutesy romance in which young university students Misato (Yuzuki Oguro) and Takuto (Riku Hirano) have their meet cute, their first dates and, after overcoming a series of impediments, find true love, even if, as Takuto points out, it is a little bit early to be talking about marriage.
These different genres are made to intersect in unexpected and increasingly chaotic ways. Like the protagonists of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Stephen Sommers’ Odd Thomas (2013), Misato sees dead people – but this perma-cheery, food-loving young adult is utterly unfazed by her ghostly companions, and loves that Takuto is accepting of her strange ability. He is even strangely comforted that Misato can see his beloved late grandmother Chie (Motoe Katsura), who has attached herself to Takuto as a guardian ghost. Meanwhile Takuto is more secretive about his own paranormal talent for reading people’s minds.
The once mighty fox spirit Tamamo, now reduced to being a mere ghost, attaches himself to Misato hoping to steal her powers so that he can regain his own, and assembles a crack team of ghosts to help him with his human heist. Meanwhile different task forces of covert ghost hunters and yōkai hunters work together – although mostly squabble, like more regular cops, over jurisdictional issues – to stop Tamamo and his spectral gang, and even that pesky bear ghost. In what ensues, the scenes of Misato and Takuto’s carefree courtship are played and replayed from different angles, so that we see them all at once as the stage for young love, and the arena for spirit war whose stakes will soon expand to a kaiju-style threat to the entire city. Such are the perils and pitfalls of romance.
On the one hand, MieMie – She Can See is full of big, crazy ideas, and is never afraid to make fun of the various subgenres that it appropriates. On the other, it is a cheap-looking, weightless CGI confection full of over-goofy characters who are all too cloyingly quirky, cartoonish and kawai to feel grounded in any kind of reality. So if you are looking for some inconsequential escapism across multiple genres, this definitely has a spirited go at delivering that – but just do not expect to find, amid all the criss-crossing storylines and honey-sweetly sickening exuberance, any flavours of depth or substance.
MieMie ~She can see~ just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
