“does your soul have a cold?”

(This still was taken from the clip linked at the bottom of this post.)

Yesterday’s “excellent documentary on depression and anti-depressants in Japan” was Mike Mills’ (not that Mike Mills) 2007 release Does Your Soul Have a Cold? I saw it on the Independent Film Channel, and unfortunately it doesn’t look as though they’re going to replay it (it’s not on DVD yet either, so no Netflix).

[Before I review a movie on this site, I have to give props to my friend Dylan, who has undertaken a brilliantly insane project: He is attempting to watch and write about 365 movies in as many days. You can follow his progress over at Dylan & The Movies. I am really enjoying reading it.]

Does Your Soul Have a Cold? follows five young(er) Japanese people over the course of six months, and talks to them about their depression and how they’re dealing (or not) with it. That’s pretty much it. The film does also point out that until 2000, the concept of depression (and even the word for it) was mostly unknown in Japan. That year, it was introduced via advertising and marketing campaigns by (Western) pharmaceutical companies selling anti-depressants. It is from one of these advertising campaigns that the film gets its title.

The film is a fairly subtle exploration of this problem (a country introduced to the American “quick-fix” before being introduced to therapy), and does not, I feel, engage in many (if any) rhetorically coercive tactics. The one user/reviewer on IMDB feels that the film lacks narrative drive, and that because of that, it isn’t compelling. S/he says, “It lacked some of that ‘oumph’ that I’ve grown so used to… That desire to see & know more.” I think this reviewer is missing the point. Depression robs a person of the desire to see and know more. The fact that the film showed depression while also sort of being depression (without depressing or boring me) may very well be its triumph: Nothing changes. These people are clearly depressed (and whether that has been influenced by the marketing campaigns is left up to the viewer), and the pills seem to do nothing. The one person who does appear to be getting better, by the way, is the only person who has actively sought out therapy (and who could name his condition before 2000), but Mills doesn’t push that at the viewer, he just lets it happen.

The film raised many questions for me: questions about the nature of mental illness and the efficacy of drugs, and questions about the nature of causality in real life and how narrative is used to portray that. I’m still working through them, and probably will continue to work through them for a long time.

Here is a link to Mills’ website and a clip from the film (I’m sorry it’s not embeddable).

If you see the movie, please let me know what you think. Maybe I’m wrong.