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Super Happy Forever is now showing on Mubi.Super Happy Forever.Scroll down to read this introduction in the original Japanese.下にスクロールすると、この紹介文を日本語で読むことができます。At the end of 2018, I received an email from two young actors, Hiroki Sano and Yoshinori Miyata. Though we had never met before, they said they wanted to make a film together. When we did meet, I found them to be nice young guys and felt like we could get along well. I didn’t have any particular plan for the film, however, so we had to start from scratch. The only condition was that they would be in it.First, I asked the two of them to write a plot. After a while, they said they wanted to try writing a screenplay. I think this went on for about two years. In the end, their stories didn’t end up becoming a film, but in the meantime,...

In this beautifully acted film, a man returns to the Japanese seaside town where he met and fell in love with his wife

For the first 40 minutes, this film’s title feels like a poke in the eye. There is nothing remotely happy about twentysomething Sano (Hiroki Sano). His wife has just died suddenly in her sleep, and Sano is visiting the sleepy Japanese seaside town where they met five years ago. He is rude and sullen, and obsessive about finding a red baseball cap he lost on that first visit. In the pain and anger of his grief, everyone sounds vapid and dumb, their words meaningless blah-blah-blah.

It’s hard to see where the happy fits in, until the film flips back in time. In the same hotel five years ago, Sano first claps eyes on his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) in a chance meeting in the hotel lobby.