THE CLONE RETURNS HOME (Japan, 2008)
Directed by: Kanji Nakajima
Starring: Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Eri Ishida, Hiromi Nagasaku

Bad news: Your husband died in Earth orbit.  Good news: We have a spare.  That's the long and short of it for the would've-been-widow of astronaut Kohei Takahara (Mitsuhiro Oikawa) when THE CLONE RETURNS HOME.  The glittering, dreamy manchild of Andrei Tarkovsky and SOLARIS, Kanji Nakajima's THE CLONE RETURNS HOME is a fog-choked meditation on identity, family, and science vs. religion, set in a near-future where human cloning is simply the most convenient solution to any unexpected worker shortage.  After Kohei is killed in a shuttle malfunction high above Earth, "Kohei #2" is activated, but with a small wrinkle: His mind is lost in memories of childhood.  Before the experts can deal with the problem, Kohei: The Sequel is on the lam in the Japanese countryside, heading for his family home and dragging the corpse of his original self along with him like a security blanket.

According to a renegade scientist assigned to the case, the clone Kohei's tragic flaw is "the enigma of resonance," the mysterious effect of a lost soul on a cloned human, when a consciousness is drawn back from the afterlife with nowhere new to go.  This poetic mix of philosophy and technology informs the entire film as we follow not one, not two but three Koheis through a personal odyssey which will either make them or break them.  Kohei is haunted by the childhood memory of the death of his twin, Noboru, and the anguish that nearly broke his saintly mother, Yoko (the luminous Eri Ishida).  His guilt and alienation informs the path of his clone, and then a third Kohei, all treading the same hallucinatory terrain looking for Yoko, Noboru, each other, and a fleeting, unified self in a strange post-death world.  As the Kohei gestalt loses track of itself amidst memories of Kohei and Noboru switching places, clones carry corpses, corpses carry clones, and just like SOLARIS, it never stops raining on mist-choked fields of green.

First-time writer/director Nakajima scored a major triumph when THE CLONE RETURNS HOME took the Sundance Film Festival by storm as a rare science-fiction entry, grabbing an International Filmmakers prize and snagging a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize.  Executive produced by no less than Wim Wenders, the film echoes his work as well as Tarkovsky's but is no slavish imitation.  Exercising Zen-like restraint over his camera and actors, Nakajima succeeds in making a picture that is both heartbreakingly intimate and intoxicatingly alien, with visual tableaus of otherworldly beauty that spellbind even when everyone's standing still.  The rich blacks, browns, blues and aquamarines make Kohei's world a watercolor waking dream, the kind you have when you're half-awake and aren't totally sure what's real.  But despite the visual splendor, the script and characters are thoroughly down to earth. 

Their basic human traumas, small by conventional measurement, are writ large here, made epic by their weight on Kohei's future, to exist or not exist, to know oneself or to be byproduct.  As bodies switch places and crucial emotional scars disappear and reappear, you'll no doubt come out of THE CLONE RETURNS HOME scratching your head, with more questions than answers.  But don't feel too bad: Kohei's the same way.  Time to go home and figure it all out.  Remember to carry your corpse on your back; you don't want to forget who you are.