Are
You Close Enough is a film about traveling. It's not, however,
your usual travel-guide video about Tokyo, or Hamburg, or Luzerne.
This film deals with a completely different aspect of traveling:
it deals with how a journey becomes a spiritual showcase for the
relativity of time and space.
The
subject of this lyrical docu-drama is a monk, walking very slowly
among the typical rush of Ginza's Sunday afternoon. Taking his small,
yet deep steps, the monk looks like a monument of silent rebel among
the busy, hurried steps around his almost slo-mo movements.
Now,
imagine you're on a train. You can see how the world passes away
from your train window. You sit there and wonder about the impressive
visual feast: while you sit still on your train, the train moves
against the background. Yet you feel that it's not you who moves,
it's your surrounding which passes away. The nearby trees passes
away so quickly, and farther in the background the fields move away
very elegantly. Then you see the mountain, and the mountain almost
stay there, only moving some millimetres away in one minute. Look
at the sun: the sun stays there, not moving away at all. Just like
the monk.
Being
travelers, each one of us has a certain place where we want to travel
to. Physically speaking, this monk - serene among the frenziness
- is not getting anywhere. I wonder how far this monk is from the
place he longs to be. Is he close enough? Can he get anywhere with
his meaningless steps?
Or,
perhaps he's there already?