J Paul Johnson
Sarogeto, first released in 2021 and just now arriving on digital on-demand in North America, seems on the surface like perfect material for old-school maternal melodrama, the kind that tugs at your heartstrings and leaves a lump in your throat. Its protagonist, a well-to-do Japanese-American wife and mother, is faced with a terminal illness. The plan she concocts for her family to go on without her is—just sound out the title phonetically—convoluted enough to stand up to any old-time tearjerker. Sarogeto intends a thought-provoking, multi-generational, and cross-cultural exploration of dying with dignity but collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.
Much of the film’s difficulties are a consequence of its own artistic intentions. Sarogeto begins a generation ago, with its adult protagonist Grace (Ikumi Yoshimatsu) reflecting on her girlhood and the loss of her father. Gauzy filters, jump cuts, repetitions, slow motion, swirling camerawork, and a portentous score consume minute after minute of precious screentime establishing little other than that little Grace’s father is dead and that she, today, still grieves. The direction seems oddly enamored with her adult self’s beauty, though that’s something it takes mere seconds, not minutes, to establish.
As an adult, Grace lives what seems like an idyllic life, married to well-to-do American businessman Michael (soap vet Winsor Harmon) and raising together their young son Augie (Tyler Ghyzel). She is diagnosed, immediately, with a life-threatening tumor by her doctor Ross Langely (played by Eric Roberts). Oddly, the diagnosis begins with an X-ray, and only after that do we see Grace exhibit any symptom or begin to examine the quarter-size growth on her upper chest.
Since the film never bothers to characterize Grace up until this point as anything other than continuing to grieve her late father or as living in bourgeois bliss, we don’t have much of a sense of her relationship with her husband or her son, or for that matter, herself as a unique individual. Sarogeto wastes what might make for some helpful character exposition with endless montages of the actress, alone, every camera shot swirling about randomly. Since we know so little about her or her relationships with her husband or son, it’s hard to develop empathy for the character’s tragic diagnosis—despite a game effort by Yoshimatsu in the lead role.
The film’s elliptical approach to storytelling does Grace’s dilemma no favors. Grace suddenly decides to interview nannies—a scene shot in a clichéd montage to frivolous musical accompaniment meant to signal humor where there is none—and settles on dorky doppelgänger Miki Endo (Ruby Park), a modern millennial whose life and demeanor stand in stark contrast to the stately Grace’s. Grace grooms Miki to be her protege and, if you read Sarogeto‘s title phonetically, you guessed it: her surrogate.
It’s a plan made for a movie plot and full of potential. To be faced with a terminal diagnosis is a serious matter, and it’s one all too common: cancer claims nearly ten million victims each year. Grace’s story, is, at least on the surface, unbearably sad: a vital woman struck down in her prime, loved by her family and leading a full and rich life. Yet the film’s direction—especially on its insistence to forgo characterization and exposition for aesthetically interesting but essentially non-narrative scenes that ponder about in infinite forests and bodies of water—hamstrings any emotional impact Grace’s dilemma might have.
Then when the film needs to advance its plot, it does so clumsily. For instance, Miki learns of Grace’s illness when she browses through a children’s storybook where Grace hides both printouts of her medical reports (scrawled with all-caps “MELANOMA” in Sharpie) and glossy 8×10 publicity-style photos of Grace’s younger self (actually the actress Park who plays Miki). Why Grace would keep these documents together in one place—this place—is anyone’s guess, save for the film’s sudden need for narrative expediency.
Dim husband Michael never does quite figure out that Grace is ill, despite some obvious clues and in one scene Eric Roberts literally telling him so; even then, he needs to hear it from a second doctor he coincidentally runs into who also knows of Grace’s condition—on the same evening. When all is said and done, it matters little, it seems, as husband and son barely grieve Grace at all; even at the end, the film forgoes any emotional denouement for still more sequences of dizzying drone shots depicting her in her afterlife hoping for resolution with the father she lost a lifetime ago. It’s the last of the film’s many inexplicable decisions.
Sarogeto‘s story of a woman ravaged by cancer and the lengths to which she might go to preserve her family’s happiness is one that, in the hands of a Sirk, Ophüls, Fassbinder, Campion, or Aronofsky might be told with both visual panache and daring storytelling. Indeed, it’s one worth telling, for how any of us might grieve a loved one or act in the face of certain death is, frankly, what storytelling is all about, and as so many masters of melodrama have proved, cinema is uniquely poised to do. Despite a game effort from its lead, Sarogeto only muddies the matters of its life-and-death story.
