the programmed elimination of the elderly in an edifying first film by Japanese director Chie Hayakawa

This anticipation film by the Japanese Chie Hayakawa radically interprets the Japanese tradition “Ubasute”, the suicide of the elderly who feel useless to society, already approached in 1983 by Shohei Imamura in Narayama walk. In the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival 2022 Un certain regard, Map 75hits theaters on September 7.

The film opens with a bloodbath reminiscent of the Sagamihara massacre: 19 residents of a home for the disabled brutally murdered in 2016 by a young man who wanted to rid Japan of these “useless” people. The rest of the film is much more subdued but no less violent. In the near future, the Japanese government decides to solve the problem of the aging of its population by passing a law authorizing the voluntary elimination of seniors, deemed useless and considered a burden for society.

This project called “Plan 75”, sold as a “right to euthanasia”, is based on volunteering. Often in financial difficulty, isolated, with low incomes, the elderly allow themselves to be persuaded by agents dispatched to the four corners of the country to recruit candidates for suicide.

They are offered money and logistical and human support to end their lives. A person calls them regularly to take stock, discuss, until the fateful date.

We follow the fate of four protagonists involved in this amazing plan. Michi still works in a hotel despite her old age but she ends up being forced to retire. With no income, she signs up for Plan 75 but gradually becomes attached to the young woman she regularly has online, and vice versa.

Maria, a Filipina caregiver, needs money to treat her sick little girl. She is hired to work in one of these dismal centers where the implementation of plan 75 takes place in an industrial way. with his old uncle who came to subscribe to Plan 75…

“PLAN 75 does not exist in reality, but everything depicted in the film does”

Chie Hayakawa

director of “Plan 75”

More than euthanasia, it is the place of the elderly in Japanese society that is questioned here. The film focuses on beings still alive, more than on the final phase of the plan. The film shows how old people are ostracized, isolated, and often plunged into misery, for lack of retirement pensions, and how shame prevents them from claiming social assistance. The film underlines the radical efficiency of Japanese society, with obedient citizens who carry out this morbid project without flinching, in the name of the collective interest.

The director films uncompromisingly but with great delicacy this cumbersome old age, the tired bodies, the sadness and the weariness that devour the looks, but also the joy and the life that continues to beat time despite the advance of age, this vitality which makes this obligatory suicide all the more barbaric.

It is in the intimacy of the characters, in the personal history of the protagonists, that humanity is revealed, as much on the side of the victims, as of the executors of the plan. Consciences are awakened when individuals are no longer mere numbers, but singular beings, recognizable, because defined by something other than their social status, or their age.

Through this anticipation film, it is the harshness of today’s Japanese society, based as in all developed countries on profitability and results, that the director denounces and the need to maintain ties, to preserve the humanity within us.

The actress Chieko Baisho, surrounded by a chorus of moving actors, wonderfully composes the character of Michi, this old lady traversed by contrary winds. A legendary actress and singer, this actress was the star of the Tora-San series, commemorated for her fiftieth birthday at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris until December.

This moving first feature film with perfectly mastered production received the Special Mention Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2022.

Gender : science fiction
Director: Chie Hayakawa
Actors: Chieko Baisho, Yumi Kawai, Hayato Isomura
Duration : 1h52
Country : Japan, France
Exit : September 7, 2022
Distributer : Eurozoom
Summary: In Japan, in the near future, the aging of the population is accelerating. The government considers that from a certain age, seniors become a useless burden on society and sets up the “Plan 75” program, which offers logistical and financial support to end their lives. A candidate for Plan 75, Michi, a government recruiter, Hiromu, and a young Filipina nurse, Maria, find themselves confronted with a deadly pact.