The French title of Koji Fukada’s quietly subversive Japanese drama nods toward a European legend, and there’s much that is Rohmeresque about this tale of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood holidaying with her aunt in a seaside town. Yet Fukada cites Mikio Naruse as a greater influence, so perhaps we should stick with the more meaningful original title Hotori no Sakuko (roughly “Sakuko on the margin”).
Fumi Nikaido plays the eponymous teenager, Sakuko, taking a year out having flunked her university entrance exams, now drifting uncertainly through picturesque surroundings in which nothing is quite as it seems. A local hotel is more like a brothel, where politicians bed underage girls; a refugee from the Fukushima disaster reveals that he couldn’t wait to get away from the damned place; a visiting professor of lofty artistic ideals hides baser desires behind a veneer of shy sophistication. There’s a clear political undercurrent to this skewering of modern Japanese society and its attitudes toward power, class and gender. Yet there’s nothing strident about Fukada’s melancholic and often touching drama, which perhaps finds its defining 4x3 image in the sight of two teenagers walking a railway track, dreaming of escape to distant places, playfully humming Stand By Me.
