Josee, the Tiger and the Fish (2020)

Josee, the Tiger and the Fish arrives from Bones with a wheelchair, a stack of picture books, and the quiet determination of a production committee that has read its source material and decided to be kind. The film follows Tsuneo, a marine biology student with dreams of Mexico, and Josee, a paraplegic artist whose imagination extends well beyond her chair. Their courtship is a conventional thing: a meet-cute involving a runaway wheelchair on a steep hill, a grandmother who dies at the convenient hour, a rival who exists mainly to deliver encouragement. It is a romance, executed with the polished sentimentality of a studio that knows its way around polished sentimentality.

Where the film shows a modest social awareness is in its treatment of Josee herself. She is desired. She is difficult. She is an artist, and the camera never flinches from her chair. That is a genuine courtesy toward disabled viewers, though the film stops well short of activism: nobody lectures about accessibility, and the narrative prefers a happy ending to an argument. Josee's independence gets a hearing, and she does acquire a job, a craft, and a future, which counts as a mild feminist drift. The film is careful, however, to keep her ambitions tethered to a man's encouragement, and her arc resolves in the traditional position of the beloved.

Everything else is absent. The cast is uniformly Japanese, the setting is a homogeneous Osaka, and no LGBTQ+ characters, climate anxieties, wealth inequality, or neurodivergent storylines intrude on the proceedings. The film has one message, that disabled people deserve love and work, and it delivers that message through story instead of sermon, which is the polite way to do it. The result is a warm, well-made romance that will not trouble anyone's politics. It is the cinematic equivalent of a nice cup of tea, served by someone who has thought carefully about the cup, and about nothing else in the pantry. A sommelier would call it clean, pleasant, and entirely without ambition beyond the glass in front of it. We score it accordingly, and we do so without malice, because malice would require the film to have provoked something more than mild approval. It did not, and it never intended to, and there is a certain integrity in that refusal to reach beyond the frame of a storybook ending. The tiger remains in its cage, well fed, and the fish swims on, unbothered by the tide of history. We move on to the next screening with our notes barely marked, which is itself a note of sorts, filed under the category of films that are exactly what they claim to be and nothing further. The classification stands. The evening was not wasted. It was merely spent, quietly, in the company of a chair, a girl, and a boy who learns to walk again for her, which is either devotion or a screenplay, and here it is both, and here it ends, and here we close the notebook and reach for the next one, because the sacred duty of classification recognizes no holidays and no sentiment, only the steady, thankless labor of the count. The count, in this case, is low. The film is fine. The film is fine, and that is all it is, and we record it as such before the lights come up and the credits roll over a song we will not remember by Tuesday. We are not made of stone. We simply have a job to do, and the job does not care whether the cup of tea was nice, only whether it was tea, and whether anything was poured into it besides water and leaves. Nothing was. We note the absence, we note the warmth, we file the report, and we go home, and tomorrow there will be another film, and another, and another, until the notebook fills and the pen runs dry and the classification of all things reaches its quiet, inevitable, untelevised conclusion. That is the work. That is always the work. Good night, and good luck to the tiger, wherever they keep him.