‘She Is Me, I Am Her’: A masterful portrayal of pandemic life

We’re nearly three years into the pandemic and yet there have been few films in Japan, or elsewhere for that matter, themed on this global contagion. This stands in contrast to the on-screen treatment of the Great East Japan Earthquake, a tragedy that inspired dozens of domestic films. The reason is something of a mystery, though one factor is doubtless visual: Actors talking through masks are not exactly cinematic.

So Mayu Nakamura’s “She Is Me, I Am Her,” a four-part omnibus film that makes the isolation and loneliness of the pandemic its central theme, is an outlier, and a welcome one at that.

Scripted by Nakamura, each segment features characters donning masks, but the pain of the four main protagonists — all played by the versatile and accomplished singled-named Nahana — is anything but muffled. The film makes an eloquent case for the value of creatively examining the pandemic’s impact on lives in Japan, both ordinary and not-so-ordinary. Also, despite their connecting theme, the four segments function well as standalone playlets, with Nahana completely inhabiting four distinctly different characters in an acting tour de force.

In the first, “Among the Four of Us,” Nahana plays Nanae, one of three friends from a college drama club who have gathered, after a gap of 20 years, in a park at night. After they remove their masks and drink a toast, their frank conversation begins to revolve around an absent club member, Sayoko, whose blossoming acting career was cut short by scandal. As revelation follows revelation, we see that the missing friend unites this trio in ways that are surprising, revealing and tragic.

In the next segment, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Nahana is a woman who greets a food delivery guy with tears — and asks him to eat her ordered meal on the spot. As he digs in, she smiles, and a strange bond is formed. She keeps ordering food and, at her request, he keeps eating it, always with the same big appetite. Finally, the pair share their secrets, including the reason for the socially awkward protagonist’s pleasure in watching someone else chow down

In the third segment, “Ms. Ghost,” Nahana is a street-wise sex worker who encounters an older homeless woman (Miyoko Asada) during one of her nightly rounds. Both women once aspired to be actors — they even both played Nina in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” — but fate and the pandemic forced them into other, unwanted paths. Based on a true story, this section has the scariest and saddest denouement of the four.

In the last segment, “Deceive Me Sweetly,” Nahana becomes a blind woman with a sweet spirit and a sharp mind, who is visited by a young telephone scammer (Yu Uemura). The man tells her he has come to collect cash promised by the woman’s elderly mother. Before she hands over the money, however, she asks to feel his face. As in the previous stories, there is a twist, one that leads to a satisfying and uplifting conclusion.

Shot on a minimal budget, the film has the feel of an actors’ workshop, with the segments easy to imagine as one-act stage plays. But the quality of the cast is uniformly high, especially the opening segment’s Fusako Urabe, who was also superb in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 omnibus, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.” Similar to that masterwork, “She Is Me, I Am Her” is both well-made entertainment and an incisive document of the present moment.