In Japan last year, there were two movies that fought for all the top prizes and number one slots on annual “Best of” lists. One was DEPARTURES, which won an Academy Award for its director, Yojiro Takita, and is now playing in New York City. The other was ALL AROUND US, by director Ryosuke Hashiguchi, which is playing at this summer’s New York Asian Film Festival (June 19 – July 5).

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Which movie is better? Read A.O. Scott’s pan of DEPARTURES in the New York Times, and then check out ALL AROUND US and decide for yourself. And don’t feel too bad for DEPARTURES director, Yojiro Takita, he’s well-represented in this year’s New York Asian Film Festival with screenings of his pink films from the GROPER TRAIN series. They’re awesome, and smutty, and aren’t pandering to middlebrow arthouse tastes at all.

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In case you have any doubts, here’s our write-up for ALL AROUND US.

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ALL AROUND US (Japan, 2008)
New York Premiere
142 minutes, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles

Directed by: Ryosuke Hashiguchi
Starring: Lily Franky, Tae Kimura, Akira Emoto, Ryo Kase
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Japanese Academy Awards – 2009
Winner – “Best Actress” – Tae Kimura
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Blue Ribbon Awards – 2009
Winner – “Best Actress” – Tae Kimura
Winner – “Best New Talent” – Lily Franky
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Hochi Film Awards – 2008
Winner – “Best Director” – Ryosuke Hashiguchi
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Mainichi Film Concours – 2009
Winner – “Best Screenplay” – Ryosuke Hashiguchi
Runner Up – “Best Film”

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Meet the Satos.  Kanao’s a dreamy courtroom sketch artist with a wandering eye.  Shoko’s a type-A personality who works in publishing, constantly fending off criticism from her dysfunctional family.  They are college sweethearts, young, in love, and pregnant, and between 1993 and 2001, time marches on without much fanfare.  As the economic bubble bursts, salarymen embezzle millions, otaku dismember little girls and religious cults unleash poison gas on the subway and Kanao’s sketchpad captures it all.  But after a miscarriage, Shoko spirals into depression and the young couple drifts apart.  And somewhere amidst the courtroom atrocities and Shoko pinning her hopes on a house spider, the Satos find each other again, and love blooms anew in a kaleidoscope of watercolor flowers.  “Living’s a skill, like painting,” the Buddhist monk next door counsels a liberated Shoko, while a repentant cultist tells the court that he didn’t desire “absolute happiness” in his life, but rather “ordinary happiness.”  It’s not much, but it’s a start.

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The Satos are not simply ORDINARY PEOPLE playing out SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE; there are no stagy confrontations or setpieces.  Instead, these characters face life, and each other, on a “come as you are” basis, sometimes repelling one another but occasionally, profoundly, intersecting, not with a swell on the soundtrack but with a curved lip or the blink of an eye.  Ryosuke Hashiguchi is a celebrated director of the so-called “New Japanese cinema,” an out gay filmmaker known for such films as HUSH.  After six years away, he returns to dissect a straight couple, and his focus is as laser-like (yet deceptively languid) as ever.

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As Shoko and Kanao, Tae Kimura and author-turned-actor Lily Franky are achingly real.  Franky does more with a sleepy glance than Tom Cruise’s arsenal of tics, transforming Kanao from a lazy womanizer into a stalwart husband struggling to navigate the unfamiliar emotional landscape of his own home.  By contrast, Tae Kimura’s metamorphosis as Shoko is a symphony – when she is reborn, it seems the world is as well.  Are Kanao and Shoko surrogates for the Japanese psyche during a window of time?  Is “ordinary happiness” enough?  Hashiguchi offers no easy answers about these people or their country.  Life is simply happening here.  It’s worth something.
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