Tag: Ryutaro Ninomiya

A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Michihito Fujii, 2020)

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“No one can survive as a yakuza in this world” according to another orphaned son playing the long game of a crime adjacent existence in Michihito Fujii’s melancholy gangster drama, A Family (ヤクザと家族 The Family, Yakuza to Kazoku The Family). The yakuza, or at least yakuza in the movies, has long been a relic of the Showa era rendered increasingly irrelevant in a society no longer in need of its dubious claims of protection. In truth, it’s hard to mourn the passing of organised crime, but Fujii at least finds a kind of pathos and infinite sympathy for these men for whom the gangster brotherhood took the place of a family even if one with a self-destructive legacy. 

To begin with, petty street punk “Li’l Ken” (Go Ayano) wants nothing to do with the yakuza, seemingly the only guest at the funeral of the drug dealer father he resented other than a corrupt cop from the organised crime squad, Osako (Ryo Iwamatsu), who expresses regret that had he simply arrested him perhaps Ken’s father would be still be alive. Visiting another “familial” environment, a Korean barbecue run by the maternal Aiko (Shinobu Terajima) herself the widow of a gangster currently with a baby on her back, Ken gets himself noticed by local mobster Shibasaki (Hiroshi Tachi) by taking on some punks who stormed into the restaurant and attacked his guys. Explaining that his guys don’t associate with drugs, Shibasaki offers him a job which he refuses but having his card in his pocket literally saves his life when he’s pickup by rival gang leader Kato (Kosuke Toyohara) after having stolen and then destroyed some of their stash after stumbling across a drug deal. The course of Ken’s life is set, he joins the Shibasaki gang along with his two delinquent friends and accepts Shibasaki as his “oyabun” or “father”. 

In Shibasaki, Ken finds a father figure more palatable than the one he lost. As in many a yakuza movie, the Shibasaki clan is positioned as “good yakuza” of the old school kind who believe in things like duty and honour and are apparently pursuing the path towards becoming “true men”. The rival Kyoyo, by contrast, are “bad” new yakuza who no longer play by the old rules and make their money through destructive vices such as drugs. The expected turf war does exactly materialise though the uneasy truce between the rival gangs becomes increasingly strained as the economic situation of millennial Japan begins to shift, the local town council apparently set on demolishing the red light district as part of their plans for redeveloping the city. Kyoyo would rather take over its entirety, pushing Shibasaki to retreat in exchange for a small amount of monetary compensation while shady cop Osako tries to play the situation to his own advantage. 

Yet it’s also clear that the yakuza as an institution is on its way out. After a 14-year prison term, Ken emerges into a very different world in which organised crime has been hounded further into the margins thanks to effective, though the film would also argue inherently vindictive, legislation. No one can make any money anymore, and the slightest slip up can lead to arrest. The Shibasaki gang is now a handful of old men, most of the guys having moved on only moving on from the yakuza life is not easy as Ken’s old friend Hosono (Hayato Ichihara) explains. In order to rejoin regular society, a former yakuza must endure five years in the wilderness unable to open a bank account or get a regular job leaving them with few possibilities for basic survival that enable them to leave a life of crime. Now with a young daughter and job in waste disposal, Hosono is nervous and reticent, reluctant to be seen in public with Ken lest he be tarred with the criminal brush and lose access to the new life he’s managed to build for himself as a responsible husband and father. 

Urged by Shibasaki, Ken eventually leaves one family for another in reuniting with a woman he loved before prison who has since made a respectable life for herself as a low level civil servant but once his life of crime is exposed by a thoughtless colleague at his new job in deconstruction, he discovers that there is no place for a “reformed” yakuza in the contemporary society because in a sense there can be no such thing. Once gangster always a gangster, there is no path forward. Complaining that Osako has stolen his right to life, Ken is told only that the yakuza lost human rights long ago. 

“They’re my family. No reasons are needed” Ken replied when asked why he became a yakuza, but he continues to find himself torn between the various concepts of family and the inheritances of his two very different father figures. “Your time is over old man”, Aiko’s fatherless son Tsubasa (Hayato Isomura) tells an unrepentant Kato attempting to hang on to his territory in the face of a younger generation operating on an entirely different level, rejecting the codification of gangsterdom but seemingly embracing its romance. Tsubasa too is later sucked in by the hyper masculine revenge drama of the yakuza way, seeking vengeance for the death of his father and apparently prepared to ruin his life in order to gain it. It’s for this surrogate son, now a kind of father figure himself, that Ken will eventually make a sacrifice. A sad tale of dubious paternal legacies, frustrated fatherhood, life’s persistent unfairness, and a perhaps uncomfortable lament for a bygone Japan defined by giri/ninjo conflict ruled by manly men, the ironically titled A Family has only sympathy for those trapped by an inescapable spiral of manly violence but also reserves its respect for those who know their time has passed and elect to end the cycle in order to set their “sons” free. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Dreaming in Between (逃げきれた夢, Ryutaro Ninomiya, 2023)

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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)

Mountain Woman (山女, Takeshi Fukunaga, 2022)

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A young woman charged with disposing of the corpse of an infant has only a few words to impart as she lowers its body to the river, “Don’t be born human in your next life.” Set in late 18th century Tohoku where famine ravages the land, Takeshi Fukunaga’s bleak fable Mountain Woman (山女, Yama Onna) sees humanity in extremis pushed to its most inhumane but also offers refuge in spirituality and a retreat to a less sophisticated existence. 

Calling this existence sophisticated might be a stretch, but there is more than a little constraint attached to the idea of community in this typical farming village in a feudal society. Bad weather has produced two poor harvests, and the villagers are beginning to feel desperate. As the film opens, a woman goes through a painful and traumatic labour only for the midwife to silently offer a cloth to her husband (Takashi Yamanaka) who ignores her pleas and smothers the child. They have nothing to feed it, and perhaps a part of him thinks it’s kinder this way. A young woman, Rin (Anna Yamada), waits outside for the inevitable and accepts a few coins to spirit the baby’s body away. Rin’s family is shunned by the other villagers because of a crime her ancestors apparently committed, and it’s for this reason that they deal with the dead. 

When it comes to handing out the rice rations, the village chief gives Rin’s father Ihei (Masatoshi Nagase) only half but justifies it as a kindness explaining that he is entitled to nothing because his family owns no land (it was taken from them because of their ancestral crime) but even those tainted with the legacy of criminality are still considered part of the community and so they are doing what they can. It’s this liminal status that begins to eat away at Rin. She’s expected to support a community that as she later says considers her less than human and gives her nothing in return. When her father is caught stealing from the rice reserves, she selflessly claims responsibility and Ihei lets her, savagely beating his daughter in front of the village elders as if he thought that might be enough to settle the matter.

It’s at this point that Rin decides to leave the village, taking off her sandals and leaving them at the gate to imply that she has been “spirited away” though everyone likely knows she has walked into the mountains to die. Several times we see her gazing at Mt. Hayachine which is where locals believe souls go after death, praying to its goddess who was herself apparently a thief and sympathetic to those who find themselves in moments of desperation. As Rin tells her younger brother who is rejected by the community because he is blind, the goddess Hayachine accepts everyone the same, good or bad, rich or poor, unlike the hypocrites from the village desperate to find a scapegoat on whom to blame their plight. There is no longer any space for sentimentality in their lives. Listening only to an old shamaness who claims to be in contact with the gods, they squabble amongst themselves for what little that remains before deciding they must sacrifice a virgin girl to the Weather God to end the bad harvests. 

But what Rin discovers in the mountains is freedom in simplicity. Having broken a taboo in stepping beyond the Mountain God Stone, she is freed from the constraints of “civility” and later tells a man who has come to rescue her that she has no desire to return for only in the mountains has felt herself to be a true human being. She encounters another person there she assumes is the mysterious Mountain Man (Mirai Moriyama) and is kind to him though he never speaks and shows her only silent comfort. It may be this that later saves her life in a fable-like moment that frees her to return to the mountain and the only place she has ever felt alive, but also says something of the inhumanity of so-called civilisation that only in a “savage” land can she find comfort and serenity. Often shot in crushing darkness contrasted with the overwhelming light and beauty of the forest, Fukunaga’s bleak tale of human selfishness implies that only by shaking off the false sophistication of an oppressive “civilisation” can one discover true humanity.

Mountain Woman screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Images: ©YAMAONNA FILM COMMITTEE

Kamata Prelude (蒲田前奏曲, Ryutaro Nakagawa, Mayu Akiyama, Yuka Yasukawa, Hirobumi Watanabe, 2020)

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A quiet suburb of Tokyo, Kamata is in someways the birthplace of modern Japanese cinema home to Shochiku’s prewar studio where the “Kamata Style” which aimed to introduce a note of cheerful naturalism to an artform defined by shinpa gloominess was forged. Produced by actress Urara Matsubayashi who hails from the area and stars in three of the four segments, omnibus movie Kamata Prelude (蒲田前奏曲, Kamata Zensokyoku) asks some tough questions about what it means to be a woman and an actress today in the contemporary capital as the heroine, “Machiko Kamata”, contends with various demands from the economic to the emotional. 

Directed by Ryutaro Nakagawa, the first segment finds Machiko (Urara Matsubayashi) introducing herself as she takes part in a strange audition dressed in an inappropriately short cosplay-style nurse’s outfit. After the audition is over, her agent tells her to say “hi” to the director, a theme which will recur in the third chapter as Machiko finds herself feeling uncomfortable, forced to ingratiate herself in order to get ahead. Annoyed after the eccentric director asks her out for dinner, she can’t help asking him why she has to wear the suspiciously skimpy nurse’s outfit provoking him into a worryingly violent outburst. At home, meanwhile, her world is rocked by her younger brother’s revelation that he’s got a girlfriend who is, ironically, a nurse at local hospital. Jealous and resentful, Machiko can’t warm to Setsuko (Kotone Furukawa) who seems improbably sweet and innocent, almost as if she came from another time (the mid-August dating and ornaments for the Bon festival might clue us in as to why). Spending a day bonding with her, however, the two women generate a kind of sisterhood which pushes Machiko into a realisation of the emptiness she feels in her life of constant struggle as an aspiring actress supporting herself mainly with her part-time job at a ramen bar. 

The themes of alienation and insecurity are only depend in the second segment, directed by Mayu Akiyama, in which Machiko reunites with a group of high school friends who are each less than honest about the state of their lives and their unfulfilled desires. Machiko gives the impression that she’s just been in a major movie with a big star, but it turns out she only played a corpse while the rest of the group are scandalised by the bombshell that their friend Marippe (Mayuko Fukuda) has got engaged to a guy from work she’s been seeing secretly for only six months. Besides being somewhat hurt not to have known she was seeing someone, the gang have different reactions to the news with hard-nosed career woman Hana (Sairi Ito) put out by Marippe’s traditional view of conventional gender roles in which she intends to let her career slide to concentrate on being a wife. A trip to a hot spring (the same hot spring seen advertised on Machiko’s T-shirt in part one) brings things to a head with a possibly cheating boyfriend eventually offering the excuse that he is merely a hot spring enthusiast sharing his hobby with a friend of the opposite sex rather than a two-bit louse indulging in the patriarchal double standard. 

Patriarchal double standards are out in force in part three, directed by Yuka Yasukawa, in which Machiko attends another odd audition where she and the other auditionees are asked to outline an episode of sexual harassment they have personally experienced. In fact, we have already seen her be inappropriately propositioned by a middle-aged producer who ran out on her in a coffee shop after she turned him down leaving her with the bill, but the episode she recounts is darker still. As she feared they might, the men in the room quickly figure out who she might have been talking about but proceed to put the blame on her implying that she sleeps around to get ahead and was only offended by the producer’s actions because he wasn’t powerful enough to be useful. It’s another woman however, Kurokawa (Kumi Takiuchi), who kicks things into gear by relating that she was assaulted by a man in a club whom she later reveals to have been the director himself only he doesn’t remember her. The director brings both women back and makes them re-enact Machiko’s tale of being inappropriately propositioned in a producer’s office, increasingly exasperated that the situation seems “too scary” as if he’s entirely missed the point of his own exercise or is actively getting off on the actress’ discomfort. The male cameraman (Ryutaro Ninomiya) is the one who eventually points out that the audition itself has descended into a protracted act of sexual harassment, seemingly conducted solely for the entertainment of the director and his assistant. 

Largely disconnected from the other three chapters, the fourth does not feature Urara Matsubayashi and is in fact set not in Kamata but in director Hirobumi Watanabe’s familiar Tochigi. The opening of his segment, characteristically filmed with static camera and in black and white, finds him once again playing a version of himself ranting about not knowing what to do with this unusual project he has taken on for the money even though he doesn’t generally make shorts, has never done an omnibus movie before, and remains suspicious of the concept. He relates all of this to his 10-year-old niece Riko (star of I’m Really Good), who says absolutely nothing while he continues to treat her as if she were the most famous actress in Japan. Somewhat poignantly, a photograph of Watanabe’s late grandmother sits on a stool off to the side, implying perhaps that little Riko has in some senses taken over her role as silent observer. The main thrust of the action follows Watanabe as he attempts to film a sci-fi movie about an alien invasion with local non-actors, but is finally linked back to the omnibus by Riko’s cheerful letter to Machiko in which she states that she wants to become an actress just like her. Ending on such an upbeat moment seems to imbue a sense of hope for the future that was perhaps previously absent, implying that the hopes and dreams of a little girl at least are worth fighting for if only to live up to her sense of expectation for the magic of the movies. 

Kamata Prelude streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Minori, On The Brink (お嬢ちゃん, Ryutaro Ninomiya, 2019)

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“Days like this make me feel I’m wasting my life” sighs just another dejected youngster in Ryutaro Ninomiya’s quietly enraged takedown of millennial malaise in a fiercely patriarchal society, Minori, On The Brink (お嬢ちゃん, Ojochan). In a culture which often favours politeness and avoids confrontation, Minori is a rare young woman determined to speak her mind though always with patience and grace and in turn a willingness to apologise if she feels that she has acted less than ideally, but her words often fall on deaf ears while those around her stumble through their lives chasing conventional illusions of happiness to mask a creeping despair. 

We first meet 20-something Minori (Minori Hagiwara) as she challenges a man who tried to force himself on her friend, Rieko, cowering quietly behind her. Minori wants an apology, but predictably he denies everything and quickly becomes angry, held back by his equally skeevy friend who advises him to apologise if only to defuse the situation. In the end Minori doesn’t get her apology and has to settle for having made a stand, retreating to avoid causing her friend more harm, but on exit the third man chases after her to ask for her contact information. Really, you couldn’t make it up. 

Part of Minori’s anger is bound up with being a so-called “cute girl” and everything that comes with it in a society still defined by male desire. Parades of idiotic young men, for some reason always in threes, come through the cafe where she works part-time expressly because a “cute girl” works there, while she’s forever being invited out by female friends who want to bring a “cute girl” to the party. Somewhat insecure, Minori worries that people are only interested in her cuteness and might otherwise reject her if, say, she were badly disfigured in some kind of accident. But what she resents most is that it’s other women who enable this primacy of the cute, the way her bashful, “homely” friend Rieko is always apologising for herself, while the other women who self-identify as “ugly” willingly cede their space to the conventionally attractive. 

In short, they submit themselves totally to pandering to male desire while men feel themselves entitled to female attention whether they want to give it or not. Dining in a local restaurant, Minori and Rieko are invited to a party by the proprietress which neither of them seem keen to go to but Rieko is too shy to refuse even when Minori reminds her of the traumatic incident at the last party with the guy who forced himself into the ladies bathroom and tried to kiss her against her will. The older woman laughs it off, affirming that he “meant no harm”, he was just drunk. This is exactly what Minori can’t stand. She keeps telling people she isn’t angry, but is she is irritated by Rieko’s need to apologise for something that isn’t her fault, seeing it as enabling the culture that allows men to do as they please while women have to obey a set of arbitrary rules of which remaining quiet is only one. 

In her own quiet way, Minori refuses to toe the line but is constantly plagued by unwanted male attention. Getting into an altercation with a creepy guy who waited outside her place of work to find out why she didn’t reply to his texts, she explains that he was just a casual hookup and that she finds his overly possessive behaviour frightening even as he continues not to take no for an answer, eventually branding her a “slut” for daring to embrace her sexuality. She demands an apology, not for what he called her but for the use of such misogynistic language. Earlier, in the trio of friends which contained Rieko’s attacker, another man had claimed he remembered Minori from a previous gathering, branding her as a “pigheaded mood wrecker” for daring to take them to task for their bad behaviour. The men talk about women only in terms of their desirability, the same man insisting that he has no interest in “strong willed women”, probably for obvious reasons. Another recounts having bullied a girl he fancied in middle-school, unable to understand why she avoided him despite bragging about having terrorised her and organising her ostracisation by the other girls (supposedly, he could do this because he was “popular”) until she finally transferred out (whether or not this actually had anything to with him remains uncertain). 

Perhaps to their credit, the other two guys immediately declare him uncool and are mildly horrified that he sold this to them as a funny story from his youth with absolutely no sense of repentance or self awareness. But their response is also problematic and born more of their boredom than their outrage, engaging in a bet over who can make him cry first as they “bully” him so that he’ll develop empathy for people who are “bullied”, never actually explaining to him why he’s being “punished”. Minori questions the problematic attitudes around her with straightforward candour, taking her cafe friend to task for her hypocrisy in taking against older men while expressing an uncomfortable preference for the very young.  

Nevertheless, Minori remains exhausted by the hypocrisies of the world around her. She declares herself “happy” with her ordinary life, a 4-day part-time job, low rent thanks to living with grandma, and spare time spent playing games. To that extent she has no desire to change her life, but the very fact of her “happiness” also depresses her in its banal ordinariness. “It’s all worthless” she suddenly cries, stunned by the inescapability of her ennui. On the brink of despair, Minori finds herself sustained only by rage not only towards an oppressive society but her own inability to resist it.

Minori, On The Brink was streamed as part of this year’s online Nippon Connection Film Festival. It will also be available to stream worldwide (excl. Japan) as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sweating the Small Stuff (枝葉のこと, Ryutaro Ninomiya, 2017)

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Sweating the Small StuffAs portraits of stagnation go, Japanese indie is no stranger though few have found a protagonist as passive as the hero of Ryutaro Ninomiya’s Sweating the Small Stuff (枝葉のこと, Edaha no Koto). Played by the director himself and sharing his name, Ryutaro is a man who barely speaks and has long since given up the illusion that anything that might be said could be of real consequence. Like most of the men in his run down town he has no dreams or ambitions, barely tolerates those who might regard him as a friend, and finds his only refuge in the pages of a book. A chance phone call produces a brief change in his routine but perhaps not enough to shake him from his committed course of listlessness.

At 27, Ryutaro lives alone in a modest, messy apartment filled with empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and piles of books. He has a dead end job at a moribund garage and spends his breaks avoiding his co-workers whom he seems to find annoying. Receiving a phone call from a childhood friend, Ryutaro informs his drunken boss that he needs to leave early before going home to eat noodles, read, and wait to be picked up. His friend, Yusuke, takes him to see his mother, Ryuko, who has been ill with hepatitis C for some years during which time Ryutaro has avoided seeing her despite having been close to her following the death of his own mother when he was just a child.

Ryutaro is a sullen sort of man, almost vibrating with an internalised rage which is only calmed at home with his books. Conversations with his friend Yusuke and later with Ryuko reveal that Ryutaro once had literary aspirations himself, even placing well in competitions, but has more or less given up writing. Yusuke also wanted to be an artist but has abandoned his dreams for a regular salaryman life, as has Yusuke’s brother Satoshi who used to bleach his hair and play in a band. Ryutaro’s boss seems to be among the few who has yet to definitively give up, planning to leave the garage to take over an interiors company owned by a friend of his mother’s who has no heirs to inherit it. Ryutaro’s boss has mentioned similar schemes before and they’ve always fallen through, but he thinks this time will be different. Ryutaro, in contrast, seems to have abandoned any idea of forward motion, refusing to pursue his literary goals, a more stable career, or relationships with friends and lovers in favour of whiling the time away inconsequentially.

Having lost his mother at a young age and then watched his step-mother battle a serious illness which she seems to have recovered from, Ryutaro perhaps has reasons to be wary of forming deep attachments. Only once does his stony facade crack, during a private conversation with Ryuko in which he tells her that sometimes he cheers himself up by remembering that there must be people in a much worse place than he is. Yet Ryutaro is not an unkind man, much of the little he does say is offered quietly in kindness such as his defence of Ryuko’s sometimes absent minded husband, but what he can’t stand is babble and insincerity. Pushed into an unwanted, vacuous conversation with a potential girlfriend he quips that he likes his cheap hairdressers because they get it done without talking before becoming overwhelmed and cruelly laying into the chatty woman with a lengthy rant about the utter pointlessness of her one-sided loquacity. Failing to realise the depth to which he’s hurt her, Ryutaro goes back to the bar where she works to try and see her again only to be rebuffed.

A similar event occurs in another bar when his boss makes a joke about his seeming blankness. Twice Ryutaro gets himself into fights and twice he refuses to defend himself, remaining passive as blows rain down on him. Trying to shut everything out, Ryutaro drinks heavily, declines invitations, and stays at home alone but Ryuko’s illness has forced him to re-emerge, to a degree at least, into the world. Caught in a state of permanent anxiety, Ryutaro finds himself paying repeated visits to Ryuko before finally attempting to talk with his equally detached father who appears to suffer from many of the same problems as Ryutaro himself.

Inspired by true events, Sweating the Small Stuff is both a picture and mild rebuke of aimless youth and of a generation which has collectively decided that everything is meaningless and devoid of purpose. In an odd way, Ryutaro, in his inertia, may be the last man standing, still resentfully clinging on to an idea of real meaning which is defined by its own absence. Ryutaro’s tragedy is that he wants more out of life than there perhaps is to be found and remains frustrated among all those content to waste their time in idle pursuits or surrender themselves to a life of respectable drudgery and ordinary happiness but there are perhaps brief flickers of connection to found even within his ever more disconnected world.

Currently available to stream via Festival Scope as part of their Locarno Film Festival selection.

Original trailer (dialogue free, no subtitles for captions)