Mainichi ga natsuyasumi

A respectable housewife's life is upended when her successful salaryman husband quits his job and her daughter drops out of school. The daughter narrates this tender but sometimes quite sharp send-up of Japanese suburban 'bliss'.

The performances rang very true, as the reactions of my (Japanese) wife attested. She, of course, sympathized with the wife. The female lead played a sweet and sincere fourteen year old now ex-schoolgirl, who trustingly follows her stepfather into a complete career change as a neighbourhood handyman. The stepfather is both sincere and pathetic in his determination to carve out a new life. Recommended, innocent fun.

When I saw this intelligent little movie in the Japanese Embassy in Singapore in 1996 I was very surprised about the lighthearted way to deal with a serious topic of being misunderstood and shunned from an ignorant society.

The protagonists, a business man and his step-daughter, situated in a Japanese middle-class family, are both not appreciating each others in the beginning. The family life is centered around a simple minded house wife competing with the neighborhood for status and giving a "good impression" to the outside world.

The man and his daughter meanwhile are living in their own "little" hells which each keeps secret from the rest of the family. He, mobbed by his colleagues and she, intimidated by her classmates, find each other one day on a park bench when they both decided to discontinue.

Teaming up together, they struggle to find occasionally work while pretending a "regular" life to their beloved mother and wife. Of course, this leads to a lot of peculiar and hilarious situations and accounts for much of the fun inside the film. In the end the "image" they were playing in front of the wife can not be maintained, and leads to one of the illustrative highlights.

I like this film very much based on the encouragement and humour this film conveys,which is by far not bound to Japanese audience.