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Everyone keeps asking Suenaga (Ken Mitsuishi) is if he’s okay. He has these tiny moments in which it looks like he’s on pause, sudden instances of stillness in which he stares vacantly into space. We start to wonder if he’s experiencing some kind of mental distress, having a stroke or developing dementia as those around him seem perplexed about his his behaviour which to us seems cheerful and pleasant. In fact, it seems confusing and unfair that he’s held in such contempt by his wife and daughter not to mention the pupils at his school and sullen young woman at the cafe he often frequents.
A man of a certain age with a once overbearing father now mute and living with dementia in a retirement home, Suenaga is indeed undergoing a crisis of life. A year away from retirement, he begins to wonder what it was all for and how his relationship with his family became what it is today. He asks his wife Akiko (Maki Sakai) if they somehow gradually became estranged from each other in an impassioned speech in which he begs for love that neither she or his daughter are very minded to give him. Perhaps we can infer from the surprised reactions to his cheerfulness and attempt to take an interest in his daughter’s life that he hasn’t always been this way, though he too seems confused and perhaps not so much trying to make a mends but only to be his real self at what he fears may be the close of his life.
When he surprises the waitress at a local cafe he goes to frequently by sitting in a different seat and then neglecting to pay the bill, it’s not really clear whether he actually forgot or did so deliberately as an attempt to assert himself. Likewise when he makes a clumsy attempt to embrace his now emotionally estranged wife or calls in sick to work it seems like more examples of his strange behaviour, yet Suenaga claims he’s becoming more of himself and on looking back over his life so far feels dejected and unfilled.
This sense of mid life crisis is exposed in his conversation with Minami (Miyu Yoshimoto), the waitress at the cafe and an former pupil. He reveals that he wanted to become a head master but didn’t make it, and thinks he was only appointed deputy head because of picking up so many cigarette butts dropped by his rebellious charges, Minami is in many ways his opposite number, young and grumpy yet also grateful to him in another way restoring meaning to his life when she tells him that his words once saved her when he told her that she was fine the way she was. Even so she goads him a little, joking and maybe not really that he should give her his retirement money so she can have a better life. Echoing the opening conversation with his father, Minami hints she may soon quit the cafe to become a bar hostess or sex worker to save up before eventually emigrating Greece.
For all his teacherlyness, Suenaga seems to be a man who wants to be more understanding. He takes an interest in his pupils though they assume he doesn’t and again tells Minami that people should live the way they choose. In the rawness of their final parting, he tells her not to do anything she’ll regret but then adds that maybe she should, as if a life with no regrets is not really lived or perhaps reflecting that despite his own unhappy circumstances he does not really regret the life he’s lived.
Filming in 4:3, Ninomiya makes great use of closeups, not least of Mitsuishl’s cheerful expression which somehow carries with it a great sorrow amid his own disappointments and yearnings. False or otherwise, there is something touching the connection of these dejected souls, the ageing teacher and the former pupil looking for permission to move on with her life but also teaching something to Suenaga in her sullen defiance and the eventual drive to keep going. Quiet and gentle if suffused with melancholy, Ninomiya’s poignant drama does indeed seem to argue that people in general are alright as they are but false acts jollity are as likely to confuse as console.
Dreaming in Between screens 1st June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 