Updated RankingSometimes a director is bad and I use this Marathon to warn you away, but sometimes I get what the director is doing, it’s just not a style I’m drawn to. In those cases, I don’t want to post and potentially scare off people who are likely to disagree with me. With Shunji Iwai, I’m reminded of Edward Yang, my first unsuccessful run at Kore-eda and Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday. There’s all the quiet observation and emotional longing of Makoto Shinkai, but instead of a high concept element of fantasy, the stories are more deceptively dense.
So, I don’t want to talk about the films that didn’t work their magic on me, but I do want to talk about the one that did.
April Story (1998) observes Uzuki as she leaves her family and her small town for college in Tokyo. It captures that feeling of dislocation, of a nervous but cheerfully optimistic young woman having her first grown up interactions. She starts shy, but polite, will catch herself saying something that’s taken the wrong way. Sometimes over-thinks if a person is joking with it or at her expense. While the culture and gender are half a world away, the experiences took me back to my own thirty years ago. The direction reminds me of François Truffaut, a series of perfect subtle moments that tell a much bigger story because the camera is always in the right place.
★ ★ ★ – Very Good