Hana to Arisu

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.

Iwai's tale of friendship and love among 15-year-olds is a bitter-sweet affair, joyous and poignant in fragments. It is not a perfect film, but still imbued with enough of Iwai's visual flair and inventiveness to raise it above much of what Japan has offered up in the first decade of the 21st century.

Hana (Anne Suzuki) is inadvertently brought to Ma-kun by her best friend Alice (Yû Aoi). She utilizes an accident to convince clumsy Ma-kun (Tomohiro Kaku) that he has lost his memory and that she is the love of his life. The lie grows out of control, and sucks in the best friend. Alice, meanwhile, has her own troubles to contend with, namely an eccentric mother, disinterested father, and an acting/modeling opportunity that continually misfires.

Like Iwai's 'Love Letter', the essentials of the plot are intricately laid out, but ultimately matter less than the shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene poetry conjured up by camera, light and direction. There is one breathtaking shot in a classroom, when Astro Boy is revealed watching brazenly over a lover's tiff. The manga motif serves to underline the heightened emotions and extreme dramatics of the tale. Similar optical playfulness is employed when Hana watches Ma-kun on the train, seemingly in conversation with his girlfriend. That shot is matched later when we are optically fooled into thinking Ma-kun will kiss Alice. It is this continual ability to surprise and delight that means the 2-hour plus running time, while self-indulgent, manages not to feel too much of an imposition.

There are some wonderful set pieces to celebrate here. Alice's father making a complete mess of gifting his daughter a fountain pen is painful and hilarious. Ditto Hana's mother appearing in her undies before a shell-shocked Ma-kun. A klutzy classmate's photos of the girls in ballet tutus turn out to be magical. These scenes, stagy and contrived in the hands of a lesser mortal, are fluid, vivid and delightful when presented by Iwai.

It is testament to Iwai's genius that a host of A-listers line up for walk-on parts in this film. For example, Hirsohi Abe, used to playing leads, is practically an extra here when he shows up as the boyfriend of Alice's mum. What other living director elicits such reverence? Hana and Alice glows, quite literally. The film captures that vividness of passionate friendships and love first encountered that only the qualia of a 15-year-old knows. Ultimately, the running time is a shade too flabby to count it among Iwai's masterpieces (the plural is deliberate), but this is a subtle, complex film worthy of repeat viewing.

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.

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.

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.