With its focus on nature – the film opens with a lengthy sequence in which the lens is trained skywards and tree branches swim languidly overhead – and emphasis on the gentle rhythms of a simple life, Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to Drive My Car seems, at first, to share DNA with Wim Wenders’s recent Perfect Days. And in Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who spends his time chopping wood, ladling spring water and teaching his eight-year-old daughter to identify saplings, there is a kinship with the beatific toilet cleaner in Wenders’s film. But even the most tranquil existences can be disrupted. And the village where widower Takumi lives is now threatened by a proposed “glamping site” for frazzled Tokyoites.
Hamaguchi’s slow-burning approach means that the film spends an inordinate amount of time observing a polite debate about the location of a proposed septic tank. But then, as both Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy demonstrated, in Hamaguchi’s hands, even the most banal conversations become oddly compelling. While not as satisfying as the director’s two previous films – a jarring ending knocks the picture off balance – this uneasy eco-parable is still very much worth your time.
