In Neo Sora’s Happyend, Tokyo — indeed, all of Japan — is preparing itself for a 100-year earthquake. The mood of the film’s opening scene, though, is not quite so existential. The threat of clashing fault lines in Earth’s crust matters little to best friends Kou (Yukito Hidaka), and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), and the rest of their ultra tight-knit clan made up of Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), Ming (Shina Peng), and Tomu (ARAZI), who are more concerned with seeing a DJ set at a clandestine club.
After being turned away by the ice-cool bouncer, Kou and Yuta are undeterred. They try an old-school alternative and sneak in through the back door carrying crates of beer like they’re part of the venue staff, though barely containing their excitement. For Kou and Yuta, music is a source of self-expression and individuality, a uniting force that persists despite their very different backgrounds. No mere bureaucratic inconvenience tonight is going to stop them, though the bouncer won’t be the last time Kou, Yuta, and their friends will have to break free of oppressive systems of authority over the course of their school year’s final days.
A surprise police raid just a few minutes later cuts short Kou and Yuta’s blissful escape from the real world. The officers’ facial recognition software, available at the snap of their phone cameras, tells them everything they need to know about these troublesome teens, specifically that Kou is part Korean — and not a naturalized Japanese citizen. In this near-future version of Tokyo, those not recognized by the state as “true” Japanese face more than just inconvenience and discrimination, in the form of putative retaliation. Happyend, then, quickly turns into more than just the story of a high-school friend group’s coming of age, but the all-too-familiar reality of incipient fascism.
Sora also tells us everything we need to know about Kou and Yuta, though more subtly than a proto-fascist state’s facial recognition software can. The working class Kou carries himself as if an invisible weight rests on his shoulders, a heaviness that is in stark contrast to Yuta, who moves through the world with the kind of effervescent, toothy grin borne of immense, unappreciated privilege. The morning after their narrow escape from the police, Kou and Yuta cross a bridge on their way home. Separated by a painted yellow line in the walkway, we know the differences in their lives are defined by more than whatever side of the proverbial tracks on which they happen to live — something deeper, unspoken, and as-yet unconfronted.
The next day at school, a silly prank involving the school principal’s (Shiro Sano) new sports car is the pretext for the installation of an ominous surveillance system called Panopty — a name that pushes the boundaries of satire — around the school grounds. It’s at this point that Sora begins to unfurl his intentions. Whether or not Kou or Yuta, or both, pulled the prank (uncertainty over the real culprit proves crucial in the film’s final act), this version of the world, be it the high school or all of Tokyo, each with rising tensions and resentments toward those in power and protests breaking out as frequently as minor earthquakes, is on the precipice of something big. What that thing is, though, no one can tell. Sora’s strength is in making this environment, with its ominous blinking lights, state-sanctioned messages projected onto cloud formations, citizen-led security groups, and culture of citizen-indexing, feel more similar to our own than we might want to admit.
But where there is surveillance, there are blind spots. Sora’s direction is highly attuned to the hidden nooks and crannies of the frame, so every choice on screen elucidates the ways his characters make space for themselves outside the purview of those in power. The underground club in the opening scene is just one example of how people literally position themselves in the shadows of acceptable society in order to be free, even if for a few minutes. Another scene late in the film expresses a similar idea, involving the handing of a cigarette from Kou and Yuta to a rule-obsessed classmate, cleverly orchestrated within the security camera’s blind spot. It’s not only a comedic bright spot in Happyend, but indicative of the way Sora thinks about the relationship between space, bodies, and politics. It’s here that Sora makes clear his understanding of exploitation as a two-way street. How one ultimately decides to position oneself on that road is a crucial but dangerous act, with costs as high as its rewards.
While blind spots are deftly handled as metaphors for the cracks in power structures, Sora generously offers an unobscured view of each character’s state of mind. Kou and Yuta, in particular, are refreshingly open, reflected in their general attitudes — Kou the world-weary son of a working-class immigrant mother, and Yuta the rich boy oblivious to his own privilege. Similarly, the contours of the world’s stakes are legible. At times as gravely important as Kou’s citizenship status or as superficial as a school uniform, the cost of individuality is measured against the necessity of conformity, and vice versa. Each are markers of identification equally susceptible to control as they are to the defiant spirit of an angry generation.
The ebb and flow between optimism and pessimism characterizes the sway of Sora’s refreshingly unfussy screenplay. Sora harnesses that fickle quality of youth to convey the film’s central thesis — that the tendrils of fascism that creep up and infiltrate our everyday lives are blind to more than we think; and that they’re susceptible to a united, rather than divided, front. And while there are times when the questions that Sora foists upon Kou and his classmates — about what it means to take action despite its consequences — strike the viewer as a little bit like Activism 101, these same questions mean something different in the lives of teenagers, for whom either everything matters, or nothing at all.
DIRECTOR: Neo Sora; CAST: Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi, Ayumu Nakajima; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN THEATERS: September 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
Comments are closed.