In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid of context for the viewer. Though seemingly calm and collected, Sano’s behaviour breaks with the social order. He asks the young boy about his hat, does it belong to him? Where did he get it? It’s not long before we find out that it’s been years since Sano was first at this beachside resort in Japan. At the hotel he asks a receptionist if they can search their lost-and-found for the same object. He remains calm but driven, his desperation only just barely peeking through.
The film’s title alludes to an ideology presented roughly a quarter of the way in. Sano, with his friend Miyata, meets up with two young women. Though strangers, they immediately connect with Miyata over their ring. It’s a keepsake from a seminar they all took called Super Happy Forever, an ideology about inviting happiness into your life. Think good, positive thoughts and good positive things will happen. Sano laughs at them, accuses them of being in a cult. They think he’s rude and fail to understand his spiteful animosity. For him, their pithy positivity can’t do anything to bring back his dead wife. He may be rude, but for Sano, the idea of Super Happy Forever feels like an insult to the finality of death.
Structured in two halves, the first part of Super Happy Forever depicts Sano’s present return to the place he first met his wife, Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto), five years before. The second half takes us back in time to their meeting. Simple but effective, the movie relies on the shared power of grief and love to transform the mundane. A hat, a song, and the horizon become ensouled with enormous significance. As the film’s structure plays with subtle reveals for the audience, it serves to emphasize connectedness, and the coincidences that unfold seem to support the idea that destiny might be real. It almost seems naive to imagine that people accidentally meet and fall in love as every action and gesture seems predestined, especially in retrospect.
In focusing on the meeting between Nagi and Sano, the film avoids many romantic clichés. The major incidents of their falling in love and later their marriage remain off-screen, and it’s by no means presented as a traditional meet-cute that indulges in overtly familiar images of courtship. Through memory, we understand that moments and incidents that seemed unimportant suddenly emerge as essential: love flourishes and exists in the in-between moments rather than the major ones. A marriage or a kiss doesn’t make a love affair. Love, like cinema, is sculpting in time.
In constructing Super Happy Forever, Kohei favors medium and long shots, which helps avoid sentimentality but also serves to obscure subjectivity. We sense that the film’s distant camera not only aids in actors feeling more intimate, freed from the pressure of being watched up close, but also as a way of suggesting the fragility of memory. While some filmmakers indulge in flashes — a face, a gesture, or an object to invoke the act of remembering — Kohei asks us instead to sit through it. Time isn’t fragmented as much as it is prolonged. In execution, this lends the impression that over time, the camera would only move further and further away from its characters, until they’re only specks on the horizon. The ones we love live on as long as we remember them, but memories fade and people die.
In revisiting the meeting between Nagi and Sano, one senses an underlying need to find meaning. Amidst the coincidences that drew the couple together, was there also foreshadowing for their relationship’s tragic ending? The film’s structure, which emphasizes loss before meeting, continually reaches toward Sato’s inevitable loss. It lingers around a relationship that is not yet formed. For Sato, the inevitability of their romance only begs the question: was Nagi’s untimely death also written in the stars?
Super Happy Forever thankfully doesn’t guide the audience by the hand to make any conclusions. Through form and performance, we’re left adrift to meditate on the nature of love and loss on our own terms. It’s a quiet and often gentle movie that transforms the mundane into something special, and the savvy use of Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” works as an effective ear worm to help encourage the film’s themes linger in the viewer’s mind, inspiring images of loneliness and connection. The song’s crisp but aching longing evokes the image of the beautiful, smiling Nagi. Just out of reach.
