‘Feelingscape’: Ordinary lives made poignant

Films about people with visual disabilities are typically about overcoming struggles — or triumphing in spite of them. In “Ray,” Ray Charles beats poverty and prejudice to become an R&B legend. In the “Zatoichi” series, the titular blind hero slices sighted opponents using his preternatural hearing to pick up the slightest motion.

Winner of the grand prix awards at the Tama New Wave and Tanabe Benkei film festivals, Ryo Onishi’s debut feature “Feelingscape” tells a compelling if slow-paced slice-of-life story about a man who has been blind since adolescence but is neither a role model nor superhero. Instead, Yoshinori Nishimura (Tomoki Kimura) works at a call center and lives alone in the small fishing port where he grew up. His passion is fishing: He soaks a line at every opportunity.

However, as played by Kimura, an accomplished veteran character actor with a mordant presence, Yoshinori is anything but average.

Since losing his sight in an accident as a teenager, Yoshinori has adapted to his disability, but longings and regrets still simmer beneath his stoic surface. Once in a while, he raises his eyes to the sky as if to soak in the light. And he still wants something more from women than sympathy or pity.

Working from his own original script, Onishi films Yoshinori in close detail, like a documentary filmmaker tracking his subject’s daily routine. We see him in a supermarket shopping for peanuts by feel (he prefers the unshelled variety) or unwittingly spilling the topping of his convenience store lunch and eating only the rice.

This sort of granular realism is both rare and revealing, but the film is, at heart, a multi-relationship drama, with Yoshinori struggling to connect to others while affirming his agency — and confronting what he has lost.

He has a conflicted relationship with his hard-pressed, sharp-tongued aunt (Shungiku Uchida). She is a caregiver for both Yoshinori and her father (Bunmei Tobayama), who is declining into senility. But while chafing at her bossiness, Yoshinori never loudly blows up at her — that standard scene in local family melodramas.

The story gets rolling when Yoshinori’s former classmate, Aoi Ohata (Kokoro Takami), returns to town to visit her ailing mother and take a break from her not-so-thriving acting career in Tokyo. Spotting Yoshinori at a bus stop, she is tempted to greet him — she knew him in junior high school when he still had full vision — but refrains with a silence that speaks volumes.

When they finally do reconnect, we see a reason for her hesitation: She had feelings for Yoshinori that have never completely faded, despite their changed situations. He senses a sympathetic current coming from her and begins to open up.

There is a tenderness to their reunion, as well as a sadness since it is doomed to be brief. But instead of proceeding predictably to a melancholy farewell, the film takes a turn both surprising and hair-raising. Yoshinori offers an unspoken exchange to Aoi: I trusted you with my feelings — will you trust me with your life?

The climax clarifies the meaning of the film’s Japanese title: “Hakobune” (“The Ark”). Though Yoshinori’s destination is unknown, he finds company on his journey in a woman who, as he belatedly understands, gives him much-needed affirmation. In such an unshowy film about ordinary lives, this realization arrives with unexpected force.