Plan 75’s Choices: Where Life Happens For You, Not To You

Jul 2

What would you do if the government offered an incentivized euthanasia plan for everyone as soon as they turned seventy five? This is the dystopian reality offered by Japanese director Chie Hayakawa’s wonderful 2022 film Plan 75. Framed as a legislative means of addressing Japan’s increasingly elderly population, it does what all great movies do. It asks us to believe in a future just that little bit different from our own, and inside of which we may have to make some uncomfortable ethical choices. Would you take the money to ensure your family and those around you had a comfortable future at your expense? Or would you shun the program and risk the dangers of becoming a social outcast characterized as an increasing drain on resources?

Hayakawa’s film details the bureaucratic mechanics of how such a program might work, and often slips more into believable documentary than dystopian fiction. There are decisions made on paper, and decisions made with friends, but with a particular focus on those responsible for implementing such a program for their older, eligible subjects. We spend time with the clerks and carers inside the program, and feel the weight of their daily routine. We see logistics followed and the machinery of population control grind through the large numbers who see it as their national duty to offer themselves as sacrifice. There are infomercials to help us get with the program, and we sit in on interviews as potential participants work through their own fears, and ultimately make a decision.

It all sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, but there’s a discreet, respectful tenderness in abundance. We see the participants in the program, primarily centered around a single elderly, lonely woman wonderfully played by Chieko Baisho, for whom the program becomes a means to live, rather than die. We see her settling her affairs with friends, and closing all the social touchpoints of life we often hold dear. But this isn’t a film about death, it’s a film about life. And what makes life worth living. It’s a film about friendship, laughter, caring, kindness, and the life-giving moments of happiness. Without fear of spoilers, there’s a wonderful twist to the end of the movie, which ends on a deeply introspective feeling of hope.

The older I get, the more I think about these kinds of decisions. I don’t feel old, I don’t look old, and I certainly don’t act my age. I still listen to the music I did when I was in my early twenties, still love to geek out about movies, video games and tv shows. I still can’t manage to eat sensibly, and there are often days where adulting just seems to be that little bit out of reach. Despite this, I still have to do adult things. I’m a dad and a boss. I have to pay the mortgage every month and file my taxes on time. I have to actively look after my health and that of my family. I have… responsibilities. I am often caught in that limbic space between what I want to do and what I have to do. And that’s the same dilemma, of course with higher stakes, which Baisho’s character, Mishi, faces in Plan 75. She is forced to make a choice between personal sacrifice and national honor, where the personal sacrifice respects and adheres to the national honor. Her choice becomes ethical duty over individual freedoms.

Last October, I turned fifty. And on my birthday, I did something I never do, but really should do more of. I spent a day in Manhattan, on my own, just doing my own thing. I didn’t have any plans, and just wandered where the wind blew me that day, free of schedule or appointment. I ended up visiting a number of places which meant something to me from the time in the early 2000s when I lived and worked there. I visited my old apartment building, my old offices, the places I used to go for lunch, the spot where I first met my wife. It was part ghost tour, but also part exorcism. I hadn’t been to those places in almost twenty years, but had thought about them often. In many ways it was a way to make peace with the past. To just sit outside and reminisce. To come to a place of peace with a distant memory, now long gone. When I did this, I remembered everything that happened when I lived in New York, a place I’d always dreamed of living in.

As I just sat quietly in the small plaza outside my old apartment building, which of course is now converted into luxury condos seemingly like everywhere else in the city, I tried to make sense of what it was I was doing. There was an ache for the past, but also an acceptance that such places had led me to where I was today. That they were part of the building blocks of my own journey, and how lucky I was, not only to have made it to fifty, but to be able to fondly reminisce about those times. And as I felt the nostalgia crash over me as others simply went about their business, I had no desire to return to the past. That it was, truthfully, the past. A temporary stop on a much larger journey, destination still unknown. It reminded me of all the friends and colleagues, long gone. And how work friends are often only that. Highly ephemeral, they burn bright in our lives, and are gone as we move from job to job. If you’re ever lucky enough to have a friendship strong enough to survive this, hold on to it for all you’ve got. It’s rare, and special.

In the finish, Plan 75 is about choice. Who gets to determine our choices and why, and the choices we make in pursuit of what we want in life. Only at aged fifty have I realized that the choices I don’t make are often happening for me, not to me. That within choices made by others around us there are still opportunities and futures I can influence and manifest. That it doesn’t matter what happens around me, it’s what I choose to do next that’s the important thing. And like Mishi, it’s finally brought me to a place where the waves of life have begun to calm, and where the wind is that little bit less turbulent, but that there’s always a lot more life to live. And where just sitting outside your old apartment building and reminiscing about the things which have made you… you, becomes truly joyous.

Plan 75 is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.