Tag: Japanese

Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Tsutomu Tamura, 1960)

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Tamotsu Tamura is best known as a screenwriter who worked closely with Nagisa Oshima, though he did actually direct a film himself at the beginning of his career. Having originally planned to become a reporter, Tamura was offered a job at Sankei Shimbun but his employment was postponed for medical reasons and he decided to retake the entrance exam for Shochiku joining the studio in 1955. Unfortunately Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Akunin Shigan, AKA The Samurai Vagabonds) was not successful at the box office and Tamura soon left Shochiku along with Oshima and became a screenwriter at his independent production company. 

In any case, the film is very reminiscent of New Wave filmmaking both in terms of theme and aesthetic. It repurposes a moribund quarry town as an almost literal purgatorial space casting the protagonists into a deep hole from which they are eternally unable to escape. As the film opens, a collection of children are taunting a young woman, Hide (Kayoko Hono), calling her a murderer and castigating her for failing to die, though it later transpires that they’ve been hired by a henchmen of Tatsuo (Masahiko Tsugawa), the brother of the man she was involved in double suicide with who is determined to become some kind of local dictator.

But even he is in some ways rebelling against his powerlessness as the son of a local politician he brands as phoney and corrupt. Tatsuo claims he hates people who claim to be good but aren’t, in much the same way as Hide claims she can no longer trust anyone. Tatsuo seems to want revenge for the death of his brother for which he holds Hide responsible but insists he doesn’t want to settle it with money nor is he in favour when a shady local man makes vague allusions to having her bumped off.

When a new recruit, Yasuo (Fumio Watanabe), joins the quarry he becomes its latest kicking bag not least because it was Hide who escorted him into town. Yasuo has a stammer and incredibly meek manner that leans towards obsequiousness. “You’re as obedient as a dog,” people often remark with Tatsuo later astutely observing that he’s the sort of person who can’t do anything without someone telling him to do it. Yet it later seems as if his desire to obey, to be liked and accepted by those around him, has led him to commit a terrible crime claiming that he only did what everybody wanted done even if they were too afraid to say so.

Ashamed of himself and his corrupted masculinity Yasuo alternately rebels and overcompensates. He refuses to hit Hide when ordered to by Tatsuo, and to sleep with her when forced by the other men, but later hits and sleeps with her possibly not quite consensually when his masculinity is challenged. The irony is that Tatsuo who claimed he wouldn’t tolerate anyone defying him cannot control Hide’s free spirit and is therefore unable to overcome his powerlessness. He bullies and harasses her insisting that she leave town, but Hide refuses to go and is continually unbothered by the way she’s treated. Hide also eventually rejects Yasuo for his cowardice, severing her ties to him on realising that he informed on one of the other men who was fugitive from justice to curry favour with Tatsuo and take the heat off himself. She tells Tatsuo that though he’s always wanted things his own way, she’s always decided for herself, infuriating him with her free decision to leave having realised how petty and meaningless it was to stay in this petty and meaningless purgatory of broken and hopeless men. 

Tamura shoots with a roving and curious camera that takes on a life of its own swooping through the dorms but lends a degree of mythic eeriness to the final confrontation in the quarry as the workers begin to dot the skyline looking down at Hide below in a scene somehow reminiscent of L’Avventura. The town’s only bright spot is presented by Tatsuo’s younger sister Kiyoko (Chiaki Tsukioka) as the voice of reason even as she  brands everything boring and meaningless but thereby suggesting that it might not have to be this way. Her words, however, fall on largely deaf ears save those of Hide perhaps finally awake to her own agency only to have it immediately crushed by fragile masculinity.

Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1945)

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Film was the primary medium for propaganda and Japan had been pumping out increasingly patriotic fare under the National Policy programme since the late 1930s but what’s interesting about those which appeared towards the war’s end is that they do not try to sugarcoat the situation or pretend that the conflict is going well, rather they use the encroaching sense of desperation as an additional motivator to get all hands on deck. Released on Aug. 5, 1945, Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kita no Sannin) was the last propaganda film to be produced and the only film currently screening when the war ended on Aug. 15. Of course, after that it was swiftly withdrawn by the Occupation forces never to be seen again except perhaps as a historical document. 

Like The Most Beautiful, the film skews accidentally feminist in its focus on three female radio operators who seem to be regarded as something of pioneers in the field. After encountering technical issues, a plane with a top secret mission is guided into an airfield in Aomori by nothing more than the voice of radio operator Sumiko (Setsuko Hara) yet on landing the pilot expresses surprise apparently stunned that a young woman would be able to perform such a stellar job. The sexist attitudes seem almost set up so they can be shot down, the pilot is quickly corrected by the ground control chief (Takashi Shimura) who explains “nowadays women can become excellent radio operators.”

Of course, this is born of necessity seeing as at this late stage there is a huge untapped resource of young and widowed middle-aged women previously discouraged from getting directly involved with the war effort. In earlier propaganda films, the most important thing a woman could do was get married and particularly to a young man who was going to the war, but this time a conflict develops between two of the women, Yoshie (Hideko Takamine) and Sumiko, because Sumiko declined to marry Yoshie’s brother Kazuo before he left because she too wanted to do her bit for the war effort and would not have been able to do so as a married woman. On learning from Yoshie that Kazuo has been killed after volunteering to lead a suicide mission, she breaks down in tears and cries that she should have married him but Yoshie, who has forgiven her on learning of her patriotic reasoning, tells her that she has done the right thing and her brother would be proud of her for serving her country. 

Meanwhile, at another airfield even deeper into the frozen north their friend Akiko (Hisako Yamane) has a developed a fondness for a research scientist but their romance is of course frustrated by the war. In a moment of fraught emotion, he tells her that he will be returning after delivering his findings and she should wait for him there which is almost to say that they will be granted their romantic resolution once the war is over. The curious thing is that Hara (Shin Saburi) is a weather scientist whose cloud forecasts have apparently been very useful to the pilots. A slightly strange diversion sees the film try to argue that at this point the greatest threat to the Japanese war effort is the weather, which aside from sounding like a very British excuse makes very little sense even if it is obviously a factor in mission success. 

The radio operators obviously can’t do much about the weather, but they can pull together with plucky spirit dedicating themselves to the national good and giving all to the war effort. While Sumiko and Yoshie are having their emotional confrontation they’re interrupted by a trio of young women who were supposed to be getting a radio demonstration from Sumiko but they’ve come to say they can’t make it because one of the other girl’s mothers has been taken ill so they’re walking up the snowy mountain to the observatory in the middle of the night to send her back and take over her shift. When the radio operator on the special flight is taken down by pneumonia (the weather, again), Yoshie volunteers insisting that she’s prepared if the worst should happen but on landing remarks that she couldn’t have got through it without Sumiko and Akiko on the other end of the line resting their success on female solidarity. Though it’s clear the film was made on a shoe string it does feature special effects by none other than Eiji Tsuburaya along with some well conceived action sequences that lend an uncomfortably thrilling note to this extremely late entry into the realms of propaganda filmmaking. 

All the Songs We Never Sang (Chris Rudz, 2023)

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A young woman finds herself diving into the past after receiving a less than enthusiastic welcome on visiting her mother’s island home in Chris Rudz’s gentle indie drama, All the Songs We Never Sang. As the title implies, the film is as much about time wasted in bitterness as it is about the surreality of life on a small island where pearl diving is still a dominant force in the local economy.

17-year-old Natsumi (Miru Nagase) has travelled to Kojima in search of her estranged aunt, Reiko (Junko Kano), her mother’s twin sister, only as it turns out Reiko is a strange and embittered woman who is only ever comfortable in the water. She grudgingly allows Natsumi to stay but only to avoid further island gossip and is unconvinced by her desire to become a pearl diver like her ancestors. As far as we can see, Reiko is one of a handful of divers left on the island and the other two are approaching old age. In fact, there don’t seem to be a lot of other young people around except for Shijo (Kai Hoshino Sandy), an eccentric boat operator and aspiring rapper with a nascent crush on Natsumi. Nevertheless, people on the island mainly remember her mother Akiko as the one who ran off with a fisherman and was never seen again.

Though the older pearl divers are kind to her, not everyone is happy to see an outsider visit and most especially rookie policewoman Yuka (Aoi Shono) who according to some has been given grandiose ideas thanks to going to university on the mainland. She is suspicious of everyone and hungry to uncover some kind of major crime, quickly coming up with an unlikely yakuza invasion as a possible explanation for a missing boat despite the fact that its owner is known to be fond of a drink or two and may simply have neglected to tie it up properly. A patient superior, Sarge (Pierre Taki), tries to explain the nature of small community policing to her that she should integrate more with the people of the island so she can tell when something’s not right and know best how to help. But her zeal for preventing crime eventually leads to accidental cruelty in bluntly divulging upsetting news, smugly proud of her successful bust without reflecting on its implications or the necessary hurt caused by an improper application of her authority as a police officer.

In a way it’s this kind of insensitivity that lies at the centre of the film as it becomes clear that Rieko has wasted the last 18 years of her life in bitterness unable to get over an act of emotional betrayal. She’s sworn off music, which she once loved, and often retreats to her bathroom to plunge herself into the water only really at peace when she’s diving. Looking for a treasure her mother supposedly left for her, Natsumi is diving too, reaching into the past while trying to figure out why her mother and Rieko became estranged and looking for a sense of home and family she feels she’s lost.

That might be the real treasure that her mother left for her even if she has to go diving for it and will need some help to bring it to the surface. In some ways a typical “island movie” about a slightly strange place more or less cut off from time, Rudz hints at a sense of despair in living somewhere there is not much else to do than drink and sing but otherwise captures the warmth of the community most of whom are very welcoming of eccentrics and outsiders even if somewhat prone to gossip for a lack of other entertainment. Through the process of their reconnection, old wounds begin to heal and a kind of peace is found with the past which is in many ways filled with “mermaid’s tears” more than pearls of joy. Still there’s a kind of lament for the songs unsung because of hurt and bitterness, and for the lost love and opportunities that went with them that has its own sense of poignancy tempered by the infinite possibilities of making up for lost time amid the gentle island atmosphere.

All the Songs We Never Sang screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Monster (怪物, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2023)

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Part-way through Hirokazu Koreeda’s probing drama Monster (怪物, Kaibutsu), a distant headmistress tells one of her teachers that “What actually happened doesn’t matter.” As in The Third Murder, the truth, so far as it can be said to exist at all, is an irrelevance. We need narrative to serve a purpose. Confronted by a worried mother, a teacher accused of using violence against a student claims there’s been a “misunderstanding,” but in many ways there has. We’re so often prevented from speaking our truth by the social conventions that govern us, because of shame, or fear, or simply because when all is said and done is it often easier not to speak.

In may ways this is the internal battle Minato (Soya Kurokawa) finds himself fighting. He sees another boy being bullied, mostly just for being different, and he wants to do something about it but he’s different too and so he’s afraid. He befriends the boy, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), but also tells him to not speak to him in front of their classmates because he doesn’t want to end up being a target. In the midst of futility all he can do is flail randomly, trashing the schoolroom not to mention his bedroom at home solely because he is unable to voice himself clearly or communicate in any other way.

Because of these lapses in communication, a series of misunderstandings arise. The language we use is often thoughtless and arbitrary. Well-meaning words can still wound. Minato’s mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), tells him that she promised his late father she’d take care of him until he had a wife and family of his own but perhaps that not something Minato will want. Similarly their teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama), described by one of his colleagues as “shifty-eyed and creepy”, makes a series of throwaway remarks that the boys should act let men, filling their heads with an idea of toxic masculinity echoed in Saori’s insistence that girls prefer boys who don’t know the names of flowers. 

Minato is reminded that the bottom layer of the pyramid holds everything else in place, but it’s a responsibility he doesn’t think he can bear. He knows he can’t be the kind of man his father apparently was, a rugby player who may have been with another woman when he died, and feels an acute sense if failure and inferiority in being unable to live up to the expectations of others. He later tells the headmistress (Yuko Tanaka) who is carrying a burden of her own that he knows he can never be happy and believes himself unworthy of it only to find an unexpected source strength in her advocation that happiness is something anyone can have, otherwise it wouldn’t be happiness at all.

Yet for all that Yori seems to be happy, or at least to affect cheerfulness in all things despite his dismal circumstances living with a troubled father who drinks and refers to him as monstrous and diseased. One of the teachers also brands the parents of his pupils as monsters feeling they unjustly “torture” them while shifting the blame for their own bad parenting. Minato too feels himself to be a monster because he senses that he’s different from those around him and is afraid of them and of himself. Throw away remarks hint at buried prejudice, such as in Hori’s dig at single mothers stating that his own mother was one and exposing a degree of insecurity masked by an outward conservatism.

We judge him for this remark, but it’s also true he’s merely parroting something that was said to him. We can never know all of the truth, and Hori suffers in part because of his “shifty-eyed and creepy” appearance that contributes to our conviction the accusations against him are likely to be true in the same way he misunderstands Minato because of his confusing behaviour and inability to communicate. Gossip weaves itself into a kind of folk truth that becomes difficult to unravel no matter the degree of veracity within it, while we discover we can never know the whole of something only the facets of it that are presented to us and might well result in “misunderstandings.”

Koreeda shifts our perspective and exposes the flaws in our assumptions, illuminating with empathy a sense of a more objective truth that was hidden from us but equally the various reasons we cannot always be truthful even with ourselves nor can we see what others see of us. Obsessed with the idea of rebirth, the boys discover their own kind of paradise in private world in the midst of nature free of social conventions or expectation and free to be exactly as they are. The ambiguity of the ending may subtly undercut its seeming utopianism but nevertheless suggests that the only objective truth may be that happiness is something anyone can have if only they can free themselves from the prejudices and petty social conventions which govern our world.

MONSTER is out in UK and Irish cinemas on March 15th. For more information, go to https://monsteruk.film/ 

Uk trailer (English subtitles)

A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Yu Kajino, 2024)

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A successful television writer is confronted with the mistakes of his past when the teenage daughter he abandoned before birth suddenly tracks him down in Yu Kajino’s indie drama, A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Donari). The film does indeed feature several storms of the more literal kind, but dances around the fallout of the writer’s unexpected reconnection along with his ongoing inability understand himself or the nature of his relationships.

This is in a sense ironic, as Omori’s (Ryuta Furuya) big hit show Cliffs of Love is a poignant romantic drama about two people who are too shy to reveal their feelings openly and consequently can only behave in ways which seem bizarre. Omori later has a similar moment to the lovers from the show when he attempts to take his relationship with casual girlfriend Satsuki further only to find her on a completely different page and explaining to him that they are both people who don’t know how to love or be loved so they were never really destined to be together for the long term. 

Even so, the man we see now, if perhaps a bit of a sleaze, does not really seem like the “human shit” his former partner Mayumi describes him to be. It’s difficult to know what brought the relationship to an end with such apparent recrimination, though the reappearance of his daughter Hikari confronts him with the possibly questionable decision he made to stay out of her life having been told by Mayumi that she intended to raise the child alone and didn’t need his input. He abandoned her with a sense of relief born of parental anxiety, yet now begins to act like a father protecting and nurturing her after she comes all the way from Niigata on the train to find him having fallen out with her mother who has taken up with a smarmy business man, Numata. 

Hikari later ironically remarks that she was never really interested in her mother until they were separated and is getting to know other sides of her thanks to talking to others that knew her. In another way, it might have been the reverse with her father who was otherwise absent from her life leading her to create her own image of him which meeting threatens to shatter. Omori dreams of attending a theme park with his now teenage daughter who is clearly too old for such things, only to suddenly realise she wasn’t with him any more and feel unexpectedly anxious for her. 

It seems that Hikari was hoping he’d be able to do something to oppose her mother’s relationship with Numata though for obvious reasons he is reluctant to do so, politely listening to Numata’s conservative political ranting without saying a word. She sees them float up like ghosts in a hotel corridor and is somehow haunted by their presence though she says she doesn’t mind her mother dating only taking a personal dislike to Numata who was a frequent customer at the bar her mother ran. As for Mayumi herself she too seems to struggle with loving and being loved, still incredibly angry with Omori all these years later while otherwise drinking heavily and playing Momoe Yamaguchi’s Last Song For You on repeat.

In any case, though the unexpected reconnection with her father may strain the relationship she has with her mother it eventually seems to give her a new kind of strength and maturity even as she contends with a self-centred boyfriend who simply rides off on his bike when she challenges him about sleeping with her friend and tries to adjust to the ironic role reversal of her mum moving on by getting a boyfriend leaving her largely home alone. Omori continues to narrate his life while researching his next drama and getting suckered by the bizarre claims of a potential subject just as he begins to interrogate himself and the regret and failures of his life. Set in picturesque Niigata with the fabulous home in which Hikari and her mother live surrounded by the nature, the film has an elemental quality in which a change in the weather can signal calamity or liberation but also a sense of peace amid the serenity of unexpected reconnections.

A Weather Report screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Momoe Yamaguchi – Sayonara no Mukougawa (Last Song for You)

Swimming in a Sand Pool (水深ゼロメートルから, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2024)

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As the film’s title implies, the teenage girls at the centre of Swimming in a Sand Pool (水深ゼロメートルから, Suishin Zero Meter Kara) each find themselves pushing forward but meeting with resistance in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s deadpan teen comedy. Inspired by a high school play, the drama has a timely quality as each of the girls reconsiders what it means to be a woman while simultaneously insisting that gender doesn’t matter. In this case, however, it seems to matter a great deal as they’re forced into the “meaningless” and Sisyphean task of sweeping their swimming pool free of the sand that drifts over from the boys’ baseball game.  

As one of the girls, Chizuru (Mikuri Kiyota), suggests, the boys probably don’t realise (or care) how their actions are inconveniencing them. It’s the middle of summer and the pool is supposed to be undergoing maintenance in August which makes this pointless task seem even more absurd yet after trying to complain to their equally frustrated teacher Yamamoto they’re told they’ve got an attitude problem and it’s only “meaningless” because they’ve decided so in heir heads. As an adult woman, you’d think Yamamoto would have more sympathy or at least some kind of advice for the girls but only seems to want to drum mindless obedience into them, insistent that if she’s told them to do something then it must in fact have meaning. At the end of her tether she snaps that perhaps she doesn’t really like having to conform to the idea of what a teacher should be either, but seems clear that one must do it anyway. Still when a friend from home expresses surprise she’s staying in town over the summer to supervise students, Yamamoto bristles when she remarks that she now seems very like a teacher and is later seen having a covert smoke round the back of the school. 

Obsessed with rules and conformity, one of the chief reasons she’s disliked by the girls is a sense of treachery in having made one, Kokoro (Saki Hamao), humiliate herself by forcing her to participate in a swimming lesson while menstruating. Yamamoto complains that she didn’t ask for an exemption via the appropriate protocols, adding that some girls use it as an “excuse” for getting out of things. Repeatedly the girls accuse each other of using their gender to make excuses for themselves in backing down in front of the boys or allowing themselves to be constrained by social ideas of femininity. Gender is indeed something they seem to think about and dwell on, Kokoro constantly insecure in her appearance while insisting that a girl must be cute in order to count and this is the way she strives for equality with men while simultaneously insisting that gender equality is a myth.

For Miku (Reina Nakayoshi), meanwhile, the opposite maybe true in that she dances the male version of the local folk dance and has done since she was little though now wears a chest binder while she does. Miku seems hurt by Kokoro’s picking at her, eventually walking off and bumping into another girls, Rika, whom it appears she may have a crush on and is a sort of rival of Kokoro’s having beaten her to become manager of the boys’ baseball team. Another girl, Yui, seems to have a similar admiration for swimmer Chizuru but is frustrated by her having experienced a moment of existential crisis being beaten in a race by baseball team star Kusonoki with whom most of the other girls are in love.

What’s true, however, is that none of the girls can do much of anything while desperately trying to sweep up all the dust the boys chucked at them so they can get their pool back and finally swim again. “Don’t take high school girls lightly,” one insists, while another decides to make a “declaration of war” but only seems to elicit snickers from the boys. Nevertheless, through their time shovelling the sand, the girls seem to have come to their own conclusions about the role of gender in their lives and generally discovered a new kind of liberation both from their own self-imposed ideas and the sometimes repressive nature of education that reinforces them. A charming teenage summer comedy, Yamashita nevertheless captures an inspiring sense of rebellion from the students who will no longer be bound by outdated notions of what everyone else tells them they should be.

Swimming in a Sand Pool screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Wash Away (うぉっしゅ, Ikunosuke Okazaki, 2024)

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A disconnected young woman begins to rediscover herself while caring for her ageing grandmother who is largely bedridden and has advanced dementia in Ikunosuke Okazaki’s lighthearted indie drama, Wash Away (うぉっしゅ, Wash). In a sense, the heroine is attempting to wash away loneliness but is ironically unable to scrub away her own while filled with a sense of shame and aimlessness in the city working at a soapland and dreaming of a career in real estate.

Soaplands are are legalised form of sex work in which generally male customers can pay pretty young women to give them a wash. Kana has been working at one for some time under the shop name Koyuki and has made a nice life for herself with a swanky apartment but has avoided returning to visit her family and has led them to believe she’s an estate agent. Despite having a maid visit three times a week, her flat is strewn with rubbish and empty fast food containers which hint at her inability to look after herself along with a sense of internalised shame. She looks to her housekeeper, Mrs Natori, as a kind of surrogate mother and is forever giving her expensive gifts and inviting her to stay for dinner in an attempt to circumvent the loneliness she feels in the false connections of her work in which the customers either become over invested in her Koyuki persona or completely forget her once the appointment is over.

As Mrs Natori later points out, it was Kana herself who had largely forgotten about her grandmother Kie whom she had not seen in at least eight years. When her mother, Sanae, has to be hospitalised for a hip operation she asks Kana to watch Kie during the day to which she reluctantly agrees. Despite not having had any recent contact with her, Kana is still disappointed when Kie cheerfully introduces herself on her arrival as if they were complete strangers meeting for the first time, something she continues to do each day that Kana arrives at the house. The irony is that part of Kana’s job is to wash her grandmother in the same way as she washes customers at the soapload though she encounters the same kind of frustrated connection unable to get through to Kie who is lost in time and often incredibly anxious that she’s late for some kind of event where everyone is waiting for her. 

Though she approaches the responsibility seriously, the truth is that Kana is fed up after the first few setbacks and decides to subcontract her care responsibilities by outsourcing to a professional carer telling herself that her grandmother would probably prefer that anyway. Her friend Sumire seems disappointed in her, remarking that perhaps Kie is in a way lucky to get to experience so many things for the first time again and meet the world with a sense of childish wonder such as in her fascination with colourful plastic balls. In an odd way, caring for her grandmother encourages to Kana to start caring for herself, gaining the confidence to speak honestly with someone she assumes won’t remember anything she says but reassured by Kie’s surprising outburst that work is work and she’s no need to feel ashamed of herself if she approaches it with pride whatever her occupation might be. 

This simple act of interest begins to reawaken something in both of them, Kie’s memory and energy seeming to improve in the light of Kana’s determination that she won’t be forgotten much as she hopes she won’t be either in a constant search for connection. Though she may have thought her grandmother had forgotten her, that she was in a sense invisible and faceless to the customers who bought her services, Kana washes away her misconceptions and learns to see herself again in repurposing her work as an act of care. Okazaki lends the world around her an off kilter quirkiness that is at odds with the despair Kana feels and while never shying away from the difficulties of caring for someone with advanced dementia allows the two women to recover both something of themselves and each other through the simple act of reconnection.

Wash Away screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sumiko 22 (スミコ22, Sawako Fukuoka, 2024)

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22-year-old Sumiko is beginning to fear that she’s losing her sense of self. Even when she hangs out with her friends, she can’t think of anything interesting to say nor does anything they say spark much of an interest. Sawako Fukuoka’s breezy, New Wave-inspired dramedy captures the sense of malaise among young people today who are quickly disillusioned with the conventionality of a stereotypical adulthood while becoming aware that all that awaits them is the constant exploitation of eternal overtime and compulsory afterwork socialising.

That might be one reason why Sumiko (Haruna Hori) quit the job she got after graduating university after only a few months. But then by contrast, her friend describes her 9 to 5 office job as “wonderful,” though adding that she works for a more benign company who have a minimum overtime policy and seem to care about her work/life balance. Her other friend is not so lucky, explaining that he’s expected to work from 7am to 11pm, though can take half the month off. He breaks down in a karaoke booth, in tears screaming that he wants to quit his job. It’s all a bit too much for Sumiko who makes a quiet exit to grab some fresh air. 

Though Sumiko puts a cheerful face on it, we often see her seemingly caught motionless in moments of complete and total despair. She doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing with her life and has no real sense of direction. Nevertheless, we can see that through her sometimes strange enoucounters she begins to regain an interest in the world along with a desire for forward motion, taking an active role in her life by offering a slice of pizza from the restaurant where she works to a man who plays the recorder in the underpass she’s sometimes fantasised about dating.

We see her gleefully draw a little cat in the sauce on top of her salisbury steak only to be middle rebuked by a radio host who can’t abide such childishness, but in a sense this is exactly what Sumiko is striving for the freedom to be cheerful and creative rather than a soulless drone valued only for her productivity. Another of her roommates also has his quirks, displaying a toy dinosaur called Tom on his bike that so impresses the proprietor of a restaurant that she makes him a little bow tie.

Sumiko lives a relaxed life, working at the pizza restaurant and otherwise spending her days wandering the neighbourhood, playing frisbee with her roommate Hana, or hanging out with friends. A female convenience store worker flirts with her awkwardly, first bonding over a shared love of cats and then admiring the line of her arms and the way they bend at the elbow. She watches a couple fight at a vending machine and then worries that she’s been rude in informing a woman wearing white jeans that her underwear line was visible when she bent down to tie her laces. The woman later seemingly becomes a friend, appearing in a short film Sumiko makes capturing the quirky surreality of her life.

Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, Fukuoka adds a deadpan voiceover to narrate Sumiko’s aimless days each broken into sections from her diary complete with an adorable crayon doodle. Sumiko might be hit by small moments of despair but otherwise remains cheerful, embracing the simplicity of her life along with the company of her friends even if it is sometimes a little hard to bear. She thinks she was born to eat cake and is obsessed with salmon, finding the moments of small joy in her life and along with them a new sense of purpose and direction that might in its own way be simply to stay still, living as she pleases and embracing her aimlessness as freedom rather than anxiety. Cute and quirky in its surreality the film captures something of life’s absurdity, but also displays a boundless empathy for those like Sumiko who aren’t so much lost as aimlessly on their way to the place they were they were always supposed to be.

Sumiko 22 screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Amalock (あまろっく, Kazuhiro Nakamura, 2024)

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The purpose of a lock, at least far as those on water are concerned, is to keep everything on an even keel and protect the surrounding area from flooding. From the lock’s point of view it might be a thankless task, people never notice you’re there unless you’ve somehow failed at your job but the lock is ever present and always about its duty even if it might be difficult to understand. For all of these reasons, the heroine of Kazuhiro Nakamura’s gentle indie drama had come to think of her father as the titular Amalock (あまろっく) but often resented him for it, seeing him only as lazy and irresponsible.

For Ryutaro (Tsurube Shofukutei), meanwhile, laughter was the only way to make life bearable. His motto was to always enjoy the things that happen in life be they good or bad which is why he puts out a congratulations sign when his grown up daughter Yuko (Noriko Eguchi) returns home after being made redundant. Despite being good at her job and in receipt of several commendations for her work, Yuko is simply not pleasant to be around and creates tension in the office with her grumpy aloofness and tendency to make younger male members of staff cry in front of her. 

The implication is that Yuko became the exact opposite of the father she thought was feckless and of no use to anyone, yet mainly finds herself lying in front of the TV in a tracksuit mainlining snacks exactly as he had done when she was a child. Seemingly trapped in an intense depression, she makes no attempt to find new work for eight years, instead being supported by her father’s moribund ironmongers. The surprise news that he plans to remarry 20 years after her mother’s death to a woman barely 20 who works at the townhall sends shockwaves through her life and turns her into a petulant, resentful teenager who can’t accept her new stepmother.

The situation is of course ridiculous. Yuko is almost 40 and Saki (Ayami Nakajo), Ryutaro’s new wife, makes no attempt to wield authority over her beyond the well-meaning attempts to introduce potential husbands more because she thinks it would be nice for her to have someone than she wants her out of the house. Even so, Yuko’s problem is that she can’t understand the way her father works and that his cheerful attitude to life has value to those around him who are buoyed up by his friendliness and easy going nature even when times are hard. Like the Amalock, he’s always been there quietly supporting her despite her scorn and resentment, preventing her from becoming overwhelmed by the floodwaters of life tragedies.

In his way, he’s done something similar for Saki who ironically only ever wanted what Yuko could have had in a happy “harmonious” family having experienced a series of troubles of her own. Saki honours Yuko’s mother’s memory and includes it in her vision of the “family,” but struggles to get through to Yuko who remains difficult and resentful unable to see the value in the kind of life that Saki wants or in herself as human who might benefit more from interacting with others. The twin stressors of unexpected tragedy and a tentative marriage proposal from a man who turned out to know her little better than she thought begin to shift her perspective allowing her to see what it really was her father brought to the world and what she might bring to it too if only she were less serious about things that don’t really matter.

That is after all how you find your way to a harmonious life, becoming an Amalock for others who can also be an Amalock for you and might be willing to make a few compromises to make that happen. Set in the tranquil town of Amagasaki, Nakamura’s gentle tale captures a little of life’s absurdities along with the simple power of good humour to make life easier to bear. Rooted in tragedy as it may be, Ryutaro’s philosophy of making life a celebration has its merits and ones which are not lost on a newly enlightened Yuko becoming more and more like her father but also like herself at the heart of a harmonious family.

Amalock screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Snowdrop (スノードロップ, Kota Yoshida, 2024)

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As the heroine of Kota Yoshida’s Snowdrop (スノードロップ) says close to the end of the film, you can become used to living in miserable circumstances and bear it because it is your normal but being suddenly confronted by them does nothing other than compound your misery. At least that’s how it seemed to her while attempting to register for social security payments after her father suffers a workplace accident and needs surgery they can’t afford in order to be well enough to be employed and earn money. 

Then again, her family circumstances are a little unusual in that her father, Eiji, left when she was little only to return 25 years later and ask to be taken in again swearing he’d work hard. Nearly 20 years after that, Naoko (Aki Nishihara) has had to give up working to care for her mother who has advanced dementia and requires round the clock care leaving Eiji as the only breadwinner though he is also elderly and working only as a newspaper delivery man which already makes it very difficult for them to make ends meet. It’s Eiji’s boss who suggests they apply for government help so that Eiji can get treatment for the gout that’s affecting his legs and get well enough to work again, though it’s clear that the family feel a degree of shame about the idea of accepting assistance even though as social worker Munemura points out it’s something that’s available to everyone should they ever need it.

The problem is however that you have to prove that you’re struggling which can be a long and difficult process. Naoko later describes it as a kind of humiliation, that she was forced to parade her penury and by doing so was confronted by the misery of her circumstances. Munemura describes her as a very earnest woman and is impressed by the way she meticulously fills in all the correct forms while the house, when they come to inspect it, is tidy and well kept (something which might actually go against you in other countries) even if they’re eying up her car and wondering if she really needs it. Munemura also sympathises with her on a personal level, realising from the forms that Eiji must have been absent from the family for an extended period and that they suffered because of it while it must also have been hard for Naoko caring for her severely ill mother alone for over 10 years.

Naoko herself has a largely beaten down, defeated aura in which she’s given up on the idea of a future for herself. She later describes caring for her mother as its own kind of escape in that she always found it difficult to get along with other people and never felt confident at work so being a carer became a kind of identity for her that she also feared losing if they were successful in their application and were able to secure nursing assistance for her mother. As well-meaning as Munemura is, she is not perhaps in the position of being able to see or deal with all sides of the issues someone like Naoko faces and is therefore shocked by the dark place her despair eventually takes her. Munemura faces a similar issue with a woman in her 70s whose claims that the cleaning job they insisted she take was simply too difficult for her at her age is treated with less than total sympathy by her slightly more cynical colleague.

A largely unexplored subplot in which it’s implied there was another sister who was given up because of the father’s abandonment and the family’s poverty hints at a deep-seated childhood trauma but also fissure within the family itself as Naoko explains her actions solely with the justification “we were a family” as if she too feared being left behind or abandoned even while her older sister has evidently been able have a family of her own though is also very sympathetic towards Naoko and in no way holds her responsible anything that happened. All she really wanted was an escape from her misery, which she may in a way get with the fresh shoots of a new life already visible to her if only she can embrace them. Shot with a detached naturalism, Yoshida’s drama is often bleak though does not lack for empathy and especially for those like Naoko who are largely left to deal with their misery all alone.

Snowdrop screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)