Hana to Arisu

Hana and Alice are best friends about to enter high school. One day, they see Masashi, a boy about their age, on board a train. Alice develops a crush on him, though it is but a passing fad. For Hana, it is something more serious, and she begins to shadow Masashi, determined to make him her boyfriend. After he has an accident, Hana convinces him he has amnesia, and has forgotten that they are a couple. Matters are complicated further when Hana makes Alice pretend to be his ex-girlfriend; and further still when Alice and Masashi fall for each other. In the face of such drama, can Hana and Alice's friendship last?

Subtle and moving, Shunji Iwai's 'Hana and Alice' is a deceptively simple comic-drama speaking depths about the human condition. It is a striking picture, the subtly strong narrative of which is all the more incredible when one considers it began life as four short films celebrating the 30th anniversary of Nestlé's Kit Kat chocolate bar in Japan. A poignant character study, examining the personalities of two complex girls, Iwai's characterisation is rich and full of depth.

Both Hana and Alice are multifaceted, layered characters, with ambitions, faults and secrets. Though not immoral or unempathetic, they are not above using others to get their own way. Through Iwai's nuanced storytelling, a vividly realistic portrayal of these two characters is created. Manipulative, but charming, they are compelling, realistic cinematic creations, with fascinating backstories; and their tale is engaging.

Throughout the film, their friendship is put to the test. Iwai uses them to make a larger point about the importance of friendship, especially during one's formative years. He also delves into the complexities of youth, displaying great insight into the adolescent mindset. Hana and Alice are on the cusp of adulthood, a strange time when one re-examines one's life, readjusting priorities. Both Hana and Alice struggle; trying to act like adults, while suffering from a dearth of positive role models.

Alice's mother is far too concerned with her own romantic entanglements, while her father is distant and awkward. Hana's mother, meanwhile, seems disconnected from her daughter, focused on her work. At one point, she addresses Masashi as Hana, seemingly not recognising that he isn't, in fact, her daughter. It is no wonder that Hana and Alice create fabulous lies when they have no-one offering them guidance.

It is an affecting picture, not to mention a funny one. Iwai's dialogue is witty and many sequences will have viewers- possessed of a certain sense of humour- grinning from ear to ear. Additionally, it is a strikingly shot film, containing artful cinematography from Noboru Shinoda. His muted work is couched in the traditions of realism, yet has a certain stylized edge to it. It is as if the film were shot as a reflection of life in a carnival hall of mirrors; visuals projecting a slightly heightened version of reality, carrying much emotional weight.

The mournful score, from Iwai himself, doesn't just complement these visuals; it heightens them, compounding their dramatic power. Further, it is well-edited film, with Iwai establishing a steady pace from the beginning. Although some criticise it as being overlong, even at two hours and fifteen minutes, in the company of Hana and Alice, time flies.

Anne Suzuki and Yu Aoi star as Hana and Alice, respectively, delivering two remarkable performances of depth, wit and nuance. Whether delivering impassioned monologues- as Suzuki does masterfully in the latter half- or performing ballet- like Aoi, beautifully, in the last act- both of them impress greatly. They'll have you laughing and crying in equal measure. Alongside them, Tomohiro Kaku does fine work as Masashi, while Sei Hiraizumi is great as Alice's father, in a solitary- but memorable- scene.

A compelling character study, Shunji Iwai's 'Hana and Alice' offers viewers a profound meditation on the complexities of youth, friendship and love. Funny and sad both, its narrative- and the characters involved- are engaging, while the cinematography and score are memorably striking. Strongly acted- especially by stars Anne Suzuki and Yu Aoi- it is a heartfelt and heartrending comic-drama that is well worth a watch.

From the dark world of junior high school boys in "All about Lily Chou-chou", Iwai has shifted to the lighter world of two high school girls.

Hana and Alice are best friends who do everything together. Alice is the leader of the pair, so it is no surprise when Hana follows her on an early morning expedition to the train station where Alice's latest crush gets the train in to school. Alice soon tires of her crush, but Hana meanwhile has fallen for the crush's "younger brother" Miyamoto and continues the trek to the station by herself.

When the two matriculate at the high school that Miyamoto already attends, Hana enters the rakugo (traditional comedic storytelling) club of which Miyamoto is one of two members. And when one day Miyamoto takes a nasty blow to the head she enters into a crazy scheme to get him to fall in love with her.

Alice, meanwhile, has troubles of her own dealing with a flighty mother, a father she rarely sees, and trying to find herself through a series of acting and modeling auditions after being scouted on the streets of Tokyo. And when she gets roped in to Hana's scheme she finds that Miyamoto is falling for her instead, and her relationship with Hana may be threatened.

The two main characters are real and appealing, neither is one-dimensional. Miyamoto is less interesting, and his motivation less clear. The visuals, as usual, are beautiful especially the frozen fields, cherry blossom lanes, and the ballet scenes. Music always plays an important part in Iwai films (especially Swallowtail and Lily Chou-chou), and the music in this one is very good (composed this time by Iwai himself)... but there are points where it is hard to tell which is the focus, the music or the story. Sometimes it seems that the movie is there to complement the music, and not the other way around.

Also the story has a tendency to wander, and may seem long to someone looking for a straight forward love/friendship story.

Personally I enjoyed the film... and found it got better on repeated viewings... I found Aoi Yu and Suzuki Anne very easy to relate to, recalling the confusion, insecurities, etc of high school days. It is one of Iwai's more comedic pieces, and at the same time subtly moving. It was not overly simplistic or clear cut. And I especially enjoyed Aoi's ballet solo toward the end of the film (both for the solo itself and it's place in the story) I think that fans of Iwai's style will enjoy it.

Keep an eye out for the many cameos (Hirosue Ryoko (of ARITA), Osawa Takao (of Lily Chou-chou), Ito Ayumi (of Swallowtail and Lily Chou-chou)... Abe Hiroshi, Yoshioka Hidetaka (voice only)... and many others)

Near the end of Mike Leigh's Vera Drake (trivial spoiler about Vera Drake but not about Hana and…), Imelda Staunton's Vera stands accused, caught, guilty. For what seems an eternity of fictional if not real time, before an ever-expanding body of those-who-know, she displays, in her eyes and quivery cheeks and chin, her shame. Shame's a fluid thing, grows, changes as one's conscience, if that's what it is, reaches about for new embarrassment on which to feed, and so is Vera's face in these scenes ever-changing. Time races, falls with a dreadful weight, but at the same instant it stops dead. Such embarrassments eventually slip our minds. Everyday rote erases them. We banish, delete, forget them, as well as we can, but they never exactly end. Each moment itself is something like eternal.

Elsewhere I've remarked the map-ability of Iwai's films: Uchiage hanabi, shita kara Miruka? Yoko kara Miruka? (1993) with both it's title conundrum and the on-the-road debarkation point for the alternate endings; April Story with its out-of-place fly casting; Love Letter in which doppelganger heroines overlap in space but never meet; Picnic whose protagonists walk the top edge of a wall that miraculously traverses their city; Yentown where the map one lives represents one's caste. Lily Chou Chou I haven't found time yet to re-watch and digest, but its characters travel, both locally and afar to that "Disney Jungle Ride" bit, and its concert throng near the end moves in a single direction that killer moves against. Motion needs map-able space. Iwai playing a film "director," in Hideyaki Anno's Ritual, walks/strolls/travels into and through the story and the maybe-mad girl's space. Undo has none of this. You hardly know where one set is in relation to another, as if linear space has collapsed into Moemi's bindings.

In Hana and Alice as in Undo, only the protagonists connect sets: trains, school, parkland, dance floor, etc. If anything in it is map-able, it's the two girls', and deadpan Miyamoto's, faces. Whether she's scheming, at a loss, or caught, Hana's face quivers with unceasing thought, at least as credibly and no less momentously than Vera caught. Like many liars, Hana thinks too much. She hasn't mastered yet the art of not thinking, seems not to realize the ease and simplicity of truth-telling. We see, much more often than hear, what Hana is thinking. Though the film's full of music, Hana's pre-verbal, or anti-verbal, thoughts reach us as if in dead silence, in what sounds like silent-film silence. Iwai's camera and his choice of close-ups of both girls suggest he knows this. I imagine Iwai cast Suzuki as Hana because of this silent ability. She'd displayed it to less merit in Returner. Aoi plays Alice less externally, or at least less facially. (My terminology's confusing. Alice is more of an introvert, perhaps, so uses body language which is external. But her face, early on, reveals less.) Note her mime-like dance in the animal suit: She slowly, magically reenters Hana's and our perception. At first Hana and we, for Hana, don't know whether to be annoyed. Is it one of those annoying stalking mimes? Is it sane?

Besides in faces, map Hana and Alice in Time. Amnesia's about losing Time, time already used, already spent, used up, gone, and so wasted if not remembered. The plot's machinations, Miyamoto's beyond-belief credibility, his in and out, on and off belief in the branchings of Hana's out-of-control lie, bend Time. Hana hands him a past, a chunk of time, then implicates Alice in yet another. Riding Hana's materialized daydream, Miyamoto travels to and fro, back and fore, but not in space. Hana and Alice is Iwai's La jetée.

But guess what! The film is hilarious. I can't think offhand of another film as simultaneously pictorial, euphonious, and simply funny. The humor is anything but situational. It has the warming reality of the everyday, of things and people we all know, because it transpires in the two girls cheeks, brows, and eyes.

There was a temptation to call H & A All About Lily Chou Chou's light antithesis. I don't feel that, choose not to. For touch points, besides La jetée and silent film, look maybe to Shakespeare's comedies, maybe even to his noisome clowns.

In recent years, Japanese director Shunji Iwai has become the dark poet of adolescence, exhibiting a profound insight into how teenagers think and act, capturing the rhythms of their speech and depicting their not always smooth transitions from being a child to becoming an adult. Iwai's bleak 2001 film All About Lily Chou Chou dramatized the isolation and emotional torment that accompanies teenage bullying and the failure of modern technology to provide an outlet for loneliness. The polar opposite is Hana and Alice, his 2004 film just released on DVD, which shows the sweet, perhaps too innocent side of Japanese high school life without any hint of the turbulence displayed in Lily.

Written and directed by Iwai who also composed the musical score, Hana and Alice is a charming comedy/drama of friendship and conflict between two junior high school girls who fall for the same boy, depicting their gradually developing ability to handle complex emotional situations without the typical coming-of-age clichés. Originally filmed as three shorts for a candy commercial, Hana (Anne Suzuki) and Alice (Yu Aoi) are fifteen year old high school students and best friends. Alice is the more free-spirited and creative of the two, while Hana is more reserved but still quite playful. The two go to school each morning on the train, attend the same ballet classes, and are virtually inseparable.

On the train, they both notice a handsome student, Miyamoto (Tomohiro Kaku), traveling with a tall American-looking boy who they guess is his older brother. Hana, pursuing her new interest, joins the school drama club where Miyamoto just happens to be a member. Following him home after school, Hana watches in horror as Miyamoto, his head buried deep in a book and seemingly oblivious to the world around him, walks headfirst into a garage door and is knocked unconscious. Seizing the opportunity after coming to his aid, she tells him that his accident has caused him to forget that she is his girlfriend. She solicits Alice's help in pretending to be his ex-girl friend but the more convoluted the lies become, the more strain is put on the girls' relationship, especially when Alice develops strong romantic feelings for Miyamoto.

Hana and Alice is a beautifully filmed and often very funny film that features gorgeous cinematography by the late Noburu Shinoda, magnificent music and ballet sequences, and brilliant performances by Aoi, Suzuki, and Kaku. The film has many memorable moments including an enchanting five-minute ballet sequence, a tearful confession by Hana minutes before she is to go on stage to perform, a glowing photo shoot of the ballet class outside at night, a fight on the beach between the two girls, and Alice's loving visit with her estranged father. While the story is thin and feels stretched over 135 minutes, Iwai's subtle delineation of character and insight into adolescent life makes Hana and Alice a film to cherish.

Hana and Alice are good friends and they do everything together. They go to the same high school and they go to school together. One day Hana falls in love with a boy who goes to the same high school. Hana deceives the boy and gets him. However, the boy loves Alice and Alice also loves him. What will happen to the relationship of the three.

I have a lot of friends but I don't have friends like Hana and Alice. They are always together and they say everything each other. They look happy and I think it is good thing. However friends sometimes become rivals. In this movie, Hana and Alice love the same man and they become rivals each other. I think moderate distance is important. We can share glad feeling or sad experience with our friends, but not interfere deeply. By watching this movie, we can rethink about the relationships with our friends.