[ Chie Hayakawas raw and sobering debut imagines a near-future
Japan in which the elderly are encouraged to volunteer for
euthanization. The scariest thing about Hayakawa’s film isn’t its
familiar depiction of a society that privileges human output over
human dignity, but rather its soft dystopian sketch of a society
that’s able to soft-shoe around dehumanization and/or sell it as an
act of grace. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘PLAN 75’ REVIEW: HAUNTING JAPANESE HEARTBREAKER IMAGINES A
DYSTOPIA THAT COULD START ANY DAY NOW  
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David Erlich
April 19, 2023
IndieWire
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_ Chie Hayakawa's raw and sobering debut imagines a near-future Japan
in which the elderly are encouraged to volunteer for euthanization.
The scariest thing about Hayakawa’s film isn’t its familiar
depiction of a society that privileges human output over human
dignity, but rather its soft dystopian sketch of a society that’s
able to soft-shoe around dehumanization and/or sell it as an act of
grace. _

Plan 75 , Plan 75 Posters

 

On July 26, 2016, a 26-year-old ex-employee of a Japanese care home
for intellectually and mentally disabled people broke into his former
place of work and stabbed 19 defenseless patients to death in their
beds. Believing his massacre to be a kind of mercy for his victims
— and a noble sacrifice for the benefit of the entire nation —
the killer wrote that he envisioned “a world where a person with
multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with an agreement from their
guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household
and social activities.”

The killer claimed that doing so was a necessary step to protect the
economy of the world’s most rapidly aging country; an economy
that’s stressed even further by the highest life expectancy of any
country on Earth, and crushes its young people under the financial
burden of paying for that longevity in the face of Japan’s strained
pension funds. He claimed that the elderly recognized themselves as
the personification of that burden, and were desperate for a way to
resolve the inconvenience of their own deathlessness.

The mass slaughter in Sagamihara was an act of civilian violence so
casual and horrifying that it seemed to owe as much to contemporary
American fascism as it did historical (and also mythical
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nationalistic self-sacrifice, but the killer was confident that his
bloodshed would strike a particularly dissonant chord in a country
where troubling ones neighbors is often internalized as an immortal
act.

To judge by Chie Hayakawa’s
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sobering and sinisterly benign “Plan 75
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from the ghoulish plausibility of the murderer’s vision — he may
have been right. The scariest thing about Hayakawa’s film isn’t
its familiar depiction of a society that privileges human output over
human dignity, but rather its soft dystopian sketch of a society
that’s able to soft-shoe around dehumanization and/or sell it as an
act of grace.

A loose knot of interconnected stories that often suggests a twisted
inversion of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life” (Hayakawa taps
into that film’s slow-motion urgency, even if she fails to match its
transcendent effect), “Plan 75” is held together by the
contemplative nature of its approach and the gentleness of its
argument, both of which allow this movie to annihilate the economic
case for euthanasia without alienating those of us who believe in the
right to merciful end-of-life care.

The film opens with its most jarring and aggressive scene as something
of a bait-and-switch: An oblique restaging of the Sagamihara attack
that tees up an alternate reality in which Japan effectively agreed to
the killer’s terms. In Hayakawa’s drama, the massacre is but one
of the many age-related, financially motivated hate crimes that has
prompted the government to create a social welfare program in which
citizens above the age of 74 can volunteer to be euthanized in
exchange for $1,000.

But that cash pittance isn’t the real incentive. For one thing, you
can’t take it with you. For another, the program is designed to
target people who have no one to spend it on. Plan 75 is meant to
attract — or coerce — lonely pensioners with tedious jobs who feel
like leaving the world before their time might be more gracious than
overstaying their welcome.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how friendly the young Plan 75 staff
might be (Hayakawa wisely neglects to show us any of higher-level
government functions), or how personalized the onboarding process is
to each volunteer (so long as it doesn’t take too long). The minute
Plan 75 was signed into law, it put an unbearable onus of expectation
on every Japanese citizen of a certain age.

Now it’s as if, with each breath, they have to justify their
continued existence to everyone they meet. And to themselves. That
kind of pressure could force the hand of even the most beloved and
well-supported person in their twilight years, let alone a semi-frail
and seemingly family-less hotel maid like Michi (Chieko Baisho). From
the moment this movie starts, it’s only a matter of time before she
numbly begins to fill out the paperwork and prepare herself for
cremation.

The rest of “Plan 75” is no less violent than its bloody prologue,
its veneer of gentility just makes it seem that way. Eager and
handsome young government lackey Hiromu (Hayato Isomura) is the kind
of gentle-natured soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and yet he doesn’t
think twice about a job that requires him to register new Plan 75
patients. In one brief scene typical of the film’s glancing fury,
Hiromu blithely participates in a demonstration of anti-homeless park
benches. As Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” would suggest, the soul of
a city is reflected in its parks and playgrounds.

Later, Hiromu will experience a change of heart when his estranged
uncle submits to Plan 75. Hayakawa obfuscates such conventional
developments to a degree that makes them feel less staid — if also
less satisfying, as is the case with an unformed plot thread about a
Filipina nurse who takes a job at Plan 75 to help raise money for her
sick daughter back home — but her film is always more compelling
when it privileges mournful details over bigger story beats.

That’s especially true when it comes to Michi, whose despondent
surrender to the Plan 75 process is raw and heartbreaking right up
until the moment when Hayakawa threatens to interrupt it in the dying
minutes. The quiet resignation of Basho’s performance faintly echoes
that of “Tokyo Story” actress Chieko Higashiyama, but it’s
further complicated here by a deep well of resentment, and also a
last-ditch grasp at getting something more out of life.

Michi and the young woman assigned to prepare her for euthanization
develop a protocol-breaking friendship in a well-rendered subplot that
evokes “Ikiru” in its own way. The warmth and compassion these
strangers show to each other is painfully counterbalanced by the
purpose of the government program that brought them together, and the
benign sterility of Hideho Urata’s cinematography — at once both
menacing and melancholy — allows the spontaneous beauty of that
friendship to sit alongside the inevitable loss that overshadows it.
What good is a healthy economy when the richest parts of life are
stripped of their value?

“Plan 75” isn’t for or against assisted suicide, but it tenderly
laments a society in which “death with dignity” is only offered as
compensation for a life without it. This is an ultra-delicate whisper
of a drama — the kind in which a typical scene might consist of an
old woman sitting alone in her apartment for several minutes of
haunted silence. And yet the anger that fringes such bittersweet
moments gradually accumulates into a palpable and lingering rage at
how good we’ve become at branding cruelty as compassion.

Rewatching the movie, I was morbidly amused by the opening title card
announcing that its production was subsidized by the Japanese
government. I wonder how they felt about the role they play in this
story, especially the part when Plan 75 proves so lucrative that
rumors begin to swirl about rebranding it as Plan 65 instead.

_"PLAN 75" SCREENED AT CANNES IN 2022. KIMSTIM RELEASED “PLAN 75”
AT THE IFC CENTER ON APRIL 21. IT OPENED IN LOS ANGELES AT THE LAEMMLE
GLENDALE ON FRIDAY, MAY 5. WATCH FOR IT ON NETFLIX AND AMAZON PRIME IN
COMING MONTHS._

* Film
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* Film Review
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* Plan 75
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* Chie Hayakawa
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* Jananese Film
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* euthanization
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* assisted suicide
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