Kaza-hana

One thing for sure, this movie is too slow-moving! I mean, there she was walking up the stairs. I closed my eyes out of boredom and fell asleep, and there she was, still walking up the stairs!

The idea is good, but the final outcome is not. The scene where the female character falls into dreaming state is too long and does not convey anything.

Rating: 5 out of 10

A beautiful story on the age-old theme of love and hope, set against a background of two contrasting Japans, city Tokyo and countryside Hokkaido.

The ending while predictable, is movingly conveyed by its leading actors with much warmth, sincerity and truth of the moment. Koizumi Kyoko shines in her first film role and Asano Tadanobu is perfect as the down-and-out Sawaki Kenji who finds his salvation in the struggling Yuriko.

...but with a happy ending.

About a drunk loser engages the services of a pink bar girl (sort of an escort). Then go on a road trip to the countryside of Hokaiddo. Sounds familiar? ....sounds like Leaving Las Vegas to me.

Except the ending is not quite as dark.

The film is peppered with flashbacks. Flashbacks of the drunk loser are on how they met, but the pink bar girl's flashbacks go further back on her previous life when she was happily married up to the point of tragedy.

I notice much of his work is in how people look. It always balloons from there with our assumptions about them. Here he is a bureacrat in a suit but also mildly drunk the whole time, more of an anti-yuppie. She a stripper with a heart of gold.

I believe his character is meant to display a casual and banal cruelty. The son of privilege and means, but is a generational black hole.

It flips the expectation. Throughout it we think he is damaged beyond repair rather than the self-indulgent narcissist that he is. We also underestimate her real pain, thinking she is there to fix him.

Much of it only sets in after, it is like it was being constructed for our memories. Overall, Somai's final film has a quiet majesty to it.

Waking up in a public park with no trousers on and an unknown woman lying with her head in your lap isn't the best way to start a relationship, even less so when Renji Sawaki (Tadanobu Asano), a junior government minister, discovers that the woman Yuriko (Kyokon Koizumi) is the hostess at a "pink club", and that he has agreed a suicide pact with her. In the sober cold light of day Sawaki thinks better of it, but as his personal life and career are in bad shape, he decides it might be an opportune moment to get away from things and takes up Yuriko's offer to travel to the remote island of Hokkaido, where she hopes to be reunited with a daughter she left behind as a baby five years previously.

The reasons for this unlikely alliance aren't immediately clear and Somai's complicated, challenging structure doesn't help. Two threads, occasionally interweaving, move backwards in time in a disorienting manner, tracing the events that have brought both characters together in despair. The main road-movie thread of Yuriko and Sawaki travelling to Yuriko's hometown in Hokkaido is also a difficult journey – with two very different personalities, each with their own problems and unable to find any solace in each other's company, the journey isn't exactly a forward looking one either. The outlook in Kaza-hana may be constantly bleak, but the emotional pay-off makes it worthwhile, and the performance of the two leads is outstanding.