by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi, Shina Peng, ARAZI, PUSHIM, Ayumu Nakajima, Makiko Watanbo, Shiro Sano
Intro:
… works both as giggle-worthy entertainment and potential tool of awakening.
While stories of teenage rebellion on film are plenty, they are part of an especially pertinent aspect of Japanese cinema. Youth cultures that arose from the wreckage of World War II to the sensationalist stories of juvenile delinquents that flooded local news cycles in the wake of the 1992 asset price bubble burst, the collective and prolonged atmosphere has led filmmakers to examine the implosive (Suicide Club and its infamous mass death opening) and explosive (Fudoh: The New Generation’s yet-to-be-topped use of a dartgun) outcomes of all that turbulence. This included pointing fingers at the adults who created these environments to begin with; there’s been many a joke about Hunger Games being Battle Royale for mainstreamers, but it says something when their shared notion of youth being set up to fail resonated so strongly across national borders.
Happyend, the narrative feature debut of writer/director Neo Sora (Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus), offers a somewhat lighter perspective on those same ideas. His depiction of the near-future Tokyo high school that (supposedly) teaches our main characters is like something right out of a Black Mirror episode, with increasingly invasive surveillance docking what are essentially social credit points for such heinous crimes as… hugging or stepping outside of class.
But right from its opening scene, showing the students making the classic mistake of wearing their uniforms while trying to get into a club, there’s a strangely inviting atmosphere created by the characters. At the core of the main group are best friends Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), whose duelling perspectives on the society around them forms the crux of the film’s tone. On one end, aspiring DJ Yuta has more-or-less accepted how garbage the world is, with constant threats of a once-in-a-century earthquake keeping the people good and scared (and in need of ‘safety’), while fourth-generation Kou decides that he’s had enough of being constantly harassed for citizenship ID and seeks a way to change things for himself and others.
What ensues is an examination of the rebellious spirit created by these conditions. That which sees music as the greatest liberation that can be felt (props for giving some shine to underground legend ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U) and upturning the principal’s car as a much-needed reprieve from the hostile surroundings. While the general uplift in tone helps deliver the notion that change is possible, it might be a bit too light to really deal with the dread. In a film that takes aim at racial profiling and education as a microcosm for dystopia, it can often feel like the obstacles are far less imposing than they should be, and the task of overcoming them not intense enough.
Sure, criticism can be directed towards the capacity for misanthropy in this sub-genre’s noted classics, where ultraviolence is served as salacious gratification as much as thematic texture. But those elements made the true horror of what inspired such things (and even what they would unknowingly predict in turn) impossible to ignore. Here, it’s as if there’s an intent not to make the narrative circumstances too uncomfortable, which defeats the purpose and, even worse, draws an unfortunate air of frivolity to the eventually-abandoned examination of anti-Korean hostility in Japanese society.
While this film’s approach leaves something to be desired, that doesn’t detract from what Happyend gets right. It’s a story meant to break down what is increasingly seeming like an inevitability within mainstream schooling (and not even just in Japan, given the whirlwind of censorious discourse concerning Western education systems), and it does so in quite entertaining and empathetic fashion.
It highlights both the need for righteous reaction to the powers that be and how such a stance would arise naturally just from existing under their sway, given further weight by the performances of the main group and Neo Sora still showing his father Sakamoto-san’s influence on his sleeves, right down to naming the film after a Yellow Magic Orchestra deep cut.
Happyend may not go as hard into the specifics as its artistic predecessors, but as a more accessible and optimistic portrayal of similar subject matter, it still works both as giggle-worthy entertainment and potential tool of awakening.
