Naomi Kawase is a director coming from Japan. She’s simply awesome. Actually, she’s more than a film director, she’s a poet. Hanezu is more a poem than a film. In it, a sculptor has a relationship with a married woman. Everything is calm, they meet, they’re delicate. The sculptor has a nest of sparrows in the ceiling of his house. At her house, the woman has a bird in a cage. A mythological love story between mountains is intertwined. Because Kawase filmed and edited the movie itself, the movie has an eerie feel. There are images of flowers, of bugs crawling on the grass. Everything mounts to a feeling.
Hanezu, at times, feels like the Japanese version of a W. Herzog movie.