'Silver Express' Explores Asexual, Aromantic Identity — SkimNews
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- Miki Tanaka makes her feature directorial debut with 'Silver Express,' a character study centered on Chieri, an aromantic and asexual woman navigating social pressure to adapt to heteronormative relationships.
- Yui Okamoto delivers a debut performance as Chieri that 'delicately embodies the character's uncertainty,' with the review noting that her social friction stems partly from her orientation and partly from ordinary social awkwardness.
- Hayato Kurihara plays Shoya, a fellow aromantic who is not asexual and who accepts Chieri without judgment, introducing what the review frames as a relationship free of 'ulterior motives.'
- The film uses a recurring train metaphor—the 'Silver Express' carrying 'silver lions' to a final stop—as Chieri's private symbol of belonging among other aromantic and asexual people, a concept the review notes is linguistically new in Japanese, with 'asexuality' entering common parlance as a loan word only in the past 10-15 years.
- Tanaka's stylistic choices—discordant scoring and harsh, cold lighting during scenes of social rejection—visually embody Chieri's subjective experience of romance as 'invasive' rather than ambient, making warmer-lit moments of intimacy stand out.
- Yuki, Chieri's longtime friend and former roommate, functions as a time marker across the film through her career, marriage, and pregnancy, while Chieri 'mostly seems content carrying on doing what she likes.'
- The review credits the film's 'light touch' in a scene where friends literally attempt to map out Chieri and Shoya's respective orientations around a table, avoiding an overly instructive tone despite the topic's inherent expository weight.
Why it matters: The film enters a Japanese cultural context where 'asexuality' is itself a recent loan word, making its attempt to dramatize aromantic and asexual interiority a contribution to a still-unsettled vocabulary, not just a narrative one. For global audiences, it offers a rare look at how identity labels are negotiated in a language that lacks precise equivalents for the very concepts the film explores.
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