A melancholy middle-aged writer looks back to a climactic summer of his youth and the ghost of fractured friendship in Tomoki Kanazawa’s heartwarming nostalgia fest, Sabakan (サバカン SABAKAN). A classic summer adventure movie, the film finds a sense of warmth in childhood memory but also reflects on all that at the time it was impossible to understand along with a sadness in the inevitable end of summer as two boys chase the spectre of dolphins in an otherwise tranquil seaside town.
In the present day, Takaaki (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a struggling author and divorced father already behind on his child support. When he mentions working on another novel, his agent laughs at him that books like that don’t sell while trying to convince him to take a job ghostwriting for an Instagram influencer going viral for her dieting tips. Perhaps because the agent had described his writing as “quick and easy to read”, essentially anonymous and empty, he begins meditating on his childhood self repeatedly praised for his writing by a teacher who is perhaps a little easily moved.
The summer of 1986 was the beginning of the Bubble era and Takaaki’s memories are indeed filled with a series of cultural touchstones such as the idol Yuki Saito whose poster the young Takaaki sometimes kisses after dancing around singing her hits. All of which is one reason why the poverty of his classmate Kenji (Konosuke Harada) has made him even more of an outcast bullied by the other kids who follow him home and make fun of the rundown house with tarp covering the roof that he lives in with his mother (Shihori Kanjiya) and several siblings. His fisherman father died some years ago and his mother works in the local supermarket doing her best to support five kinds on a part-timer’s salary. Kenji takes a liking to Takaaki because he’s the only kid who didn’t join with the others when they laughed at him, more or less blackmailing him into a summer adventure looking for dolphins in a cove over the mountain.
Even the younger Takaaki reflects there probably weren’t any dolphins in the first place, Kenji just wanted to go on adventure with him and didn’t otherwise know how to ask. A careless word from his otherwise warm and supportive mother provokes a minor rift in the boys’ relationship that despite himself the younger Takaaki didn’t quite understand causing him to pull away from Kenji in an unwarranted sense of rejection unable to recognise that he is simply awkward and has low self-esteem which caused him to question the reality of their friendship. In any case though they are later separated by unexpected tragedy, their connection becomes a touchstone for each of them reminding them that they are not alone even if no longer together.
Kanazawa captures an impish sense of fun the boys’ adventure as they find themselves in a tricky situation with a trio of thuggish delinquents and meet an equally melancholy teenage girl at the shore who stares mournfully at a washed up can of Korean soda and explains sadly as she looks out over the sea that she herself has not been there yet. The Yuki Saito poster comes down, signalling the arrival of a coming of age and the putting away of childish things as Takaaki moves into a more concrete adulthood while still floundering in adolescent confusion and the inability to fully understand his new friendship or its growing importance in his life.
The adult him understands only too well, meditating on his memories and triggered by nostalgia on seeing a can of mackerel and remembering the carefree summer of his youth. The rediscovery of a childhood bond begins to open him up both artistically and in his relationship with the wife and daughter from whom he is separated. Told with humour and warmth, the film is filled with a sense of childhood wonder and the comfort of the everyday largely undimmed by the entrance of tragedy and the essential sadness of summer’s end. Even so it allows its melancholy hero to find a kind of salvation not only in childhood memories of dolphins and canned mackerel but in the enduring quality of a friendship that itself may have become distant.
Sabakan screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Generally speaking, where a film has been inspired by already existing source material, it’s unfair to refer to it as a “remake” even if there has been an iconic previous adaptation. That said, in the case of Tsubaki Sanjuro (椿三十郎), “remake” is very much at the heart of the idea as the film uses the exact same script as the massively influential 1962 version directed by Akira Kurosawa which also starred his muse Toshiro Mifune. Director Yoshimitsu Morita is less interested in returning to the story’s novelistic roots than he is in engaging with Kurosawa’s cinematic legacy.
Windows on Worlds 