Qualia is full of evasiveness until it decides in its finale to fully cut loose and bring all emotions to the fore. With characters who are exemplary in their submissiveness and general flatness, you wonder what you are watching. But just underneath it all, an interesting tale on gender roles is being told.
Yuko, married into the Tanaka family’s chicken farm, endures bullying. One day, Ryosuke’s mistress, Saki, applies as a live-in worker and reveals her pregnancy. To avoid scandal, they let her stay, starting an unusual cohabitation.
An odd little off-beat drama, Qualia seems more than content in brushing the surface of our characters without dipping too deeply into what makes them work, with all of them exhibiting their own oddities that fill you with intrigue. You want to know more about these characters than what Ryô Ushimaru is willing to tell us. While it can feel like a frustrating watch, by making the majority of his characters submissive, you begin to feel for them, no matter how much you would never want to be around them in real life.
Take Yuko, for example; Kokone Sasaki has gone for a strange, almost Shelley Duvall-esque performance (in a way that if Wendy Torrance never cracked under the horror happening to her). She is so placid and easy-going, too easy-going frankly, that you are constantly wondering when she will burst, but other than the odd prophetic word here and there that leaves others slightly stunned, she is just happy to go along with things. Even when accepting Saki into the household and knowing her relationship with Ryosuke.
Of course, we learn later that she knows far more than she has let on to Saki, but it is an interesting performance from Kokone that pulls you in with intrigue. Returning to those little bursts, we see Yuko struggle to be mean to a plumber via voicemail who was meant to fix their heater, she rushes through her Satomi approached monologue and you figure that she will go at one point. But instead, she uses that positivity to be forthright by the film’s end.
Quietness and awkwardness are the order of the day in Qualia. We have a group of people who are just going on with their lives the only way they know how. The males, Ryosuke and Taichi, do not fuss about anything. Heads down and patient, they are odd, defeated men. For Ryosuke, we know that is out of guilt, but Taichi is a mystery. They both get moments to stand up for themselves or someone or something they care about. Interestingly, they do so only to men; they never stand up to the dominant Satomi.
What makes Qualia work so well is how it centres on the idea of gender roles, not just on the farm with our characters either, but also with the chickens. The roosters are not to mix with the hens. Otherwise, the eggs will be fertilised and useless for selling as food. So, the males are kept apart, kept obedient, and only needed when called upon. With our women, Satomi and Yuko are childless; so like their thousands of hens, they are only of use for the roles they currently play and eventually, when the time comes, they, like their hens that cannot lay any more eggs, will be discarded callously by the harsh world.
Yuko sees that with Saki, a pregnant younger woman, she has more use to the farm as she can raise the next, just like those fertile hens that Yuko and Taichi are reluctant to let go. We even talked about a bullied hen who needed special attention to recover, and Yuko hoped she could return it to the group. However, Ryosuke feels it will just be attacked again. It exactly mirrors Yuko and her situation. It’s not subtle work, but it is effective in helping the audience feel about some of the characters’ situations.
These parallels eventually allow the film to explode in chaos and farce in the final act. You get the feeling that Ryô Ushimaru didn’t quite know how to get more out of the themes from the script, but then you realise that this was probably all very intentional. We are meant to feel this way about these characters because, after all, they are just chicken farmers who unknowingly live too close to their animals. A rewarding watch.
★★★ 1/2
The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 takes place in cinemas around the UK from 7 February – 31 March 2025.
For further information: https://www.jpf-film.org.uk/
