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Cannes 2022: the shock film "Plan 75" on euthanasia, by the Japanese Chie Hayakawa

"Plan 75", a fictional film by Chie Hayakawa about a plan to euthanize elderly people in a fictional Japan, presented at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

7 mins

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With her first feature film, she succeeded in winning the official selection of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. With "Plan 75", the Japanese director Chie Hayakawa, 45, attacks with impressive sensitivity and power of persuasion to a highly explosive subject: the not so unrealistic possibility of a policy of euthanasia promoted by a state among its elderly.

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RFI: Your film begins with a shocking scene: a young man, gun in hand, kills himself, after executing all the residents of a retirement home, including the last in a wheelchair.

This sequence is all the more disturbing because it is both incredibly surreal and realistic at the same time.

Did you take it from a real event in Japan?

Chie Hayakawa:

This scene is inspired by a news item that took place in Japan in 2016, the Sagamihara massacre.

It was in an institution receiving people with disabilities.

A young man, a former employee of this establishment, returned and murdered 19 handicapped people and injured about forty.

He justified himself by saying that people with disabilities were useless in society.

According to him, it is unfair that the state uses public money to take care of these people.

It was therefore an act that he had done in devotion to his country.

For him, it was a right act.

I was very marked by this drama, because it has a really very representative meaning, a tendency towards intolerance which has been growing in recent times with regard to fragile people and the elderly in particular.

There is a form of racism which, little by little,

applies to these people.

For that, I wanted to make it the starting point and the subject of the film.

It is this news item that inspired the opening scene.

At the center of the story is the question of euthanasia.

What does this shot 75 imagined for your film consist of?

And, beyond the film, does such a plan seem to you to have the potential to become realistic when we project ourselves into the Japan of 2040 or 2050?

In the film, this plan 75 is a system, measures put in place by the Japanese government.

This plan allows people over 75 – if they wish – to end their lives.

So it's a way of recognizing the right to euthanasia.

We are indeed talking about a fictitious measure!

It does not exist at the moment.

The aging of the population is a social problem of which all Japanese are aware.

A problem that is getting worse every year.

This is a question that carries with it a rather strong concern for everyone in our country.

Aging is really an anguish for many Japanese.

We wonder how we will do, for example, if we have senile dementia, or what will happen to us if we become physically unable to be independent.

We wonder how we will manage to get by financially.

All these anxieties make old age really considered scary.

And this feeling tends to increase in recent years.

For this, if the 75 plan really existed, there would be a certain number of people who would adhere to this proposal.

You begin your film with shots very close to an impressionist painting, with greenish tones, the appearance of the silhouette of a tree trunk behind stained glass… What aesthetic treatment of the image did you choose for deal with this very serious subject of euthanasia?

This plan 75 is disguised violence, coated in something very sweet that has, at first sight, a very friendly, very practical, very benevolent face.

In reality, it hides a very strong form of dehumanization and cruelty that really undermines people's dignity.

So, I wanted to make this contrast visible by magnifying the form a little – like the coating of this shot 75 –, the staging too, and thus accentuating somewhere this contrast between the facts and the form that we give them.

The subject of euthanasia has already been dealt with often in cinema, but almost always on an individual level.

You have chosen to address this issue at the level of a State that actively promotes euthanasia.

Since the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany which also murdered hundreds of thousands of handicapped and mentally ill people (considered " 

") during the Second World War, this has been an absolute taboo. .

Do you have the feeling that this taboo is disappearing?

I would first like to say that this film is not a pro-euthanasia film.

The important thing for me was to show the danger that a State, a country, could intervene or have the right to watch over the life or death of people.

You have to be aware of how dangerous this terrain is and the subject must be treated with great care.

It's true, until now, films that talked about euthanasia tended to make special cases of it.

While there, what interested me was this movement of influence that a country can have on the dignity of people.

This is the central point of my film.

The question of euthanasia in the films of the Cannes Film Festival

The sensitive subject of euthanasia has already often caused controversy at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2012, Michael Haneke won the Palme d'or with

with Emmanuelle Riva, who played a wife as loving as she was desperate and courageous, putting an end to her husband's agony.

In 2016, the shock film

, by Alain Guiraudie, starkly portrayed a homosexual act between a young and an old man to alleviate the terrible suffering and give the final blow to the last.

Last year, it was François Ozon who tackled the subject of euthanasia head-on.

In

, he pushed the reflection even further with a man certainly very old of 85 years, having already lived a cerebrovascular accident, but which had however recovered almost all his capacities.

Despite this, he decides to end his life in a clinic as specialized as it is expensive in Switzerland, against the advice of his family.

With

, presented in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section, Chie Hayakawa gives the question of euthanasia an even more spectacular dimension.

But the originality of Chie Hayakawa's approach also consists in drawing, implicitly, beyond the question of euthanasia, a portrait of a generation which is in the process of disappearing after having rebuilt Japan after the Second World War. world.

These merits, the director does not display them openly in this film dedicated to euthanasia, but through very small details highlighting the values ​​represented by this generation in daily life.

We follow in the footsteps of Michi, a septuagenarian living very modestly and alone, who has just been fired as a hotel cleaner.

In addition, his building will be demolished to make way for a more modern construction.

She then discovers the existence of Plan 75.  

Despite the misfortune that befalls her, Michi will remain modest and discreet in all circumstances, without forgetting the prayer and her gratitude for each bowl of rice.

His whole life was based on the principle of thinking of others.

Don't waste water when washing dishes.

After cutting the nails, do not throw away the ends, but turn them into fertilizer for plants at home.

Be ready to sacrifice for the good of the country.

In her fiction film, Chie Hayakawa ingeniously shows how the trap closes when the government uses the values ​​of older generations to push them to accept the euthanasia plan.

A bonus of 100,000 yen is planned to soften the signature of precarious people and ensure them a few last weeks without worries.

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