In ancient Japan there was a custom called ubasute. It is a long-standing and rather cruel tradition in which members of the community, in some difficult times, left the oldest members to die. Young people would pick up the oldest ones, who had already lived their lives, and take them somewhere in the mountains or some other secluded place and leave them there to die so that they would have one less mouth to feed. Today, on the other hand, Japan is the country with the oldest population on average in the whole world, the country with the most centenarians, and the fact that there are increasingly frequent comments that the elderly are just a burden on society and that many continue to be parasites for decades after they retire, the local filmmaker Chie Hayakawa she decided to use it as an idea for her debut film.
Unfortunately, from a potentially sensational idea, Hayakawa made a strangely boring and monotonous film, which she presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes festival. “Plan 75” really disappointed me because the beginning of the film here promised that it could be a real sensation, but Hayakawa literally managed to kill it all with an incredibly slow pace and a disappointing plot and denouement. Apart from the fact that Japanese society is old, it is also known for the fact that the people there are obedient, they don’t complain, they don’t whine a lot and they usually do what is asked of them. Thus, “Plan 75” brings a dystopian vision of Japan where the government introduced the controversial Plan 75, which encourages residents over 75 to euthanize in order to help the system.
This was partly caused by the fact that hate crimes against old people began to spread in Japan and many residents kill old people in a rage because they consider them unnecessary parasites. Although Plan 75 is in principle voluntary and anyone who signs up can give up if they change their mind, this is not exactly the way Michi (Chieko Baisho), an old woman who until recently worked as a laundress in a hotel despite her advanced age, will experience it on her own skin. Michi has no family, she would still work, but not only no one wants to hire her anymore, but no landlord wants to rent a room to an unemployed person, so she will decide that subsidized euthanasia is her best option.
Hayakawa made one of those films in which we follow several characters whose destinies will come together, so in addition to Michi we also have Hiromu (Hayato Isomura), a young bureaucrat from the government’s euthanasia program, whose cruel and cynical view of the fate of the elderly he determines will change when and his uncle applies for Plan 75. There is also Maria, a Filipina cleaner who works in the preparation for cremation of the bodies of euthanized elderly people who is forced to do this work in order to earn money for her daughter’s heart surgery. The idea itself here is not completely disturbing, but rather controversial and provocative, but it is a real shame that it got stuck in the realization and that the film turned out to be so monotonous and boring.