Hadashi no pikunikku

This black comic feature takes a cute, but somewhat dull-witted high school student (model Noburu Iguchi, in her acting debut), and runs her through a series of increasingly bleak misadventures during about a week's time. It's not enough that her grandmother dies; but on the way home, she drops the urn, scattering the ashes to the winds. She gets lost, loses her clothes (several times), becomes the target of a teen vengeance plot... that's just the start of her woes.

Director Yaguchi flexes his indie muscles on this features, and more than once, the effects are a bit strained. This was clearly a warm-up for his next film, My Secret Cache, which puts all of the elements together with the perfect female star. As such, Hadashi no Pikunikku has its moments, but Uguchi doesn't seem to have the chops for comic acting. (By contrast, My Secret Cache boasts the gifted Naomi Nishida, whose reaction shots were often priceless.

Happily, the director would have more indie successes, including Adrenalin Drive and the charming Swing Girls. And we shouldn't forget the continually hilarious, One Piece, which impossible to locate anymore aside from film festival showings.

Perhaps this adequate feature is best for completists, but a more mature comic style (and a better budget) will be found later.

The day before I watched this, while walking the northern edge of San Francisco's Alta Plaza Park, not far from the multiplex that houses the city's film festival, my eye caught a huge sunlit brown wing, maybe twice the size of the largest seagull's, just as it disappeared into a tall cypress. Year before last, I'd seen the same type bird, huge hawk, golden eagle, whatever it was, in the Presidio. That one swept within a few yards of me, a live squirrel in its talons, dropped the squirrel, dived to retrieve it, failed, then glided away over the bay's edge.

Toward the end of "Down the Drain," without giving anything away, there's a "Miike moment," a maybe gratuitous special effect, followed by a shot of just such a huge bird gliding above the urban site. Maybe the film's are vultures. Don't know. They also put me in mind of Larry Cohen's "Q."

Anyway, Yaguchi, on the evidence of this, "Waterboys," "Adrenalin Drive," and "One Piece!" seems a curious mix of hack and auteur. Judging from the dvd case and a manga section in the dvd "extras," this may be another movie-zation of a comic. More than once it put me in mind of the better comics-originated film "Ghost World." Yaguchi's protagonist's unrelenting bad luck never bores. At best it has the feel of Buñuel or maybe the Godard of "Weekend." But I would rather have seen a film about the thin shadow girl who lives, deliberately, not as victim, in other people's houses.

I found this a pleasant surprise when I saw it as part of a Japanese Independent film festival at the Walter Reade Theatre about 6 years back. It's a wonderful comedy of errors that gets more and more perverse as it goes along. A high school girl's life falls into the parameters of Murphy's Law as she has an incredible stream of bad luck from getting caught scamming a free ride on the subway to losing her grandma (in more ways than one) to getting lost and violated(!?!). Unbeleivable and hysterical,the film picks up speed unrelentingly as we watch her downfall until it finally tumults into a high powered cartoon of itself. This film filled me with glee for the way it starts off unassuming enough and then becomes so over the top that my jaw kept dropping between bouts of laughter. Mind you, it is a black comedy, somewhat offbeat and some might find the humor here a little sick. But I reccomend it for those with a penchant for comedy that pushes the envelope of what is standard and socially acceptable. Perhaps it's a little more typical for the Japanese sense of humor but I did find it to be as surreal and irreverant as "Duck Soup" or "Repo Man".