Hana to Arisu

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.

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)

The base layer here is teenage romance tweaked a little to frame episodes of ordinary life. Two schoolgirls fall in love with an aloof boy who believes he suffers from amnesia.

Annotating this is Celine and Julie Go Boating, which was about two girls embarking upon dreamlike adventure and mischief around modern Paris. What was so remarkable about it were precisely the elusive controls: the film didn't give out that we were, in fact, daydreaming until we were too far in to know exactly where. The clue was already laid out in the first scene, a cat of mysterious eyes and a peculiar chase through empty streets.

So you will have to pay attention to the opening scenes of Iwai's film, echoing this. Once again a chase in and out of subway cars as giggly play between the two girls. The other clue is obvious enough: Alice.

This layer borrows Rivette's whimsical light structure. Roles, guises, fiction, synchronous games about the fabrication of narratives, in our case centered at this boy who remembers nothing, is empty space, a blank stage, and the plays the girls assemble around him. He's told he was in love with one, then both. They both act parts, fashion entire pasts and emotions.

So love as this game of fiction, and getting to allow to be seduced by an image. This is excellent work, and in how it's subtly acknowledged inside the film: one girl signs up for a drama class, and has in fact done so to be close to the boy, himself an actor, the other is randomly approached on the street to model for TV commercials - and this may well reference Mikio Naruse's wonderful Street without Return from '34.

So the third layer is how the play is going to be resolved on a level behind the base narrative of ordinary life, and into the stage where love is the heightened game of duplicity.

One ploy is simple enough, opening day for the school play both girl and boy were rehearsing and a near-perfect rendition of the mechanisms that give rise to images: out on the stage performance, roles, fiction consumed as real, and backstage the internal machinations of tortured soul. The other is a little more intricate because of how unassuming: Alice auditions for a part in TV commercial.

Now so far this is no different than a French film. Notice what Iwai does, an extra layer that is deeply Japanese. Now the Japanese idea of high beauty and by extension performance, what is often perceived as quaint reticence, is formless heart expressed in visible form. Meditation.

But even a patriarch of Chan like Hongren could not so simply gauge his pupils' inner heart when the time came to decide for a succesor. What he asked instead, was that they write poems on a wall about it. This is a frequent practice in Buddhism. Painting a cycle will do, an 'ensho' meaning awareness. The hand will tell.

Now all through the film Hana has secretly contrived to cling to her object of desire, has lied and deceived. But when it comes to expressing inner self, we note that she is, in fact, a bad actress. Iwai intercuts her melodramatic reactions backstage with the actor's mock-mannerisms out on the stage. The auditorium is empty when she finally gets out for her part.

On the other hand Alice. She has been part of the ploy but with a certain affection for the part and with genuine feelings. So much so that it slipped from her, a bad actress in terms of the conventional drama of the world. We trust however that even though the image is false, she's moved to it truthfully. Her audition is to play an image on a screen. Instead the director decides on a whim that he wants her to do a ballet dance as per her resume, and in a short skirt, an almost humiliating prospect. What does she do? Channeling true self into the thing, she amazes with her skills.

So what do we get, between these two girls? Flowers in the sky, Hana meaning flower, reflecting Zen Master Dogen's notions of illusory mind images.

And on the other hand, the subtlest difference. Emptiness in full bloom. Or in the words of Dogen: being one with just this, while being free from just this.

Something to meditate upon.

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.

After the dark world of _All About Lily Chou Chou_ in which junior high kids are involved in prostitution, extortion, and murder, Iwai returns with _Hana and Alice_, a film that brings the audience to the tried and true theme of the love triangle. This time involving the young trio of Hana, Alice, and Masashi.

The story begins with the friends Hana, acted by Suzuki Anne, _Returner_, _9 Souls_, and Alice, Aoi Yu, _All About Lily Chou Chou_, _Harmful Insect_, crossing frozen fields to a distant train station. There, Alice shows Hana the object of her affection: a tall Japanese-American. The two girls ride the the train many times. Even taking secret photographs of biracial young man and a younger student who they assume is his half-brother.

However, eventually, Alice's crush is gone and only the younger man, whose nose is always in a book, rides the train. Alice is heartbroken, But Hana continues riding the train, affection for the young man growing in her heart.

When high school begins, Hana joins the Rakugo club because her crush, Miyamoto Masashi, is also a member of the club. One day, while following her crush, Hana witnesses Masashi hits his head hard on a garage door knocking him to the ground. Hana rushes up to him and asks him if he is okay. Masashi begins reciting some of his rakugo lines and is convinced that he is okay, but Hana asks him if he remembers her. On this he is not so clear, Hana then states that she is his girlfriend. This of course shocks Masashi and so begins the process of Masashi trying to recover from an amnesia created by the lovesick Hana.

I was worried by the premise of this film at first, because it has been done a number of times before. However, I should have had more faith in Iwai Shunji. This is truly a good film and it really tugs on the heart strings. Those of us who have had our love for someone else non-reciprocated while definitely be touched. The acting is well done. Especially that of Aoi Yu who played Tsuda Shiori, the young girl forced to be a prostitute in _Lily Chou Chou_. The music, as always, is very nice, and this time it was actually composed by Iwai Shunji.