Hanagatami

1941, a coastal town in the north of Japan. Toshihiko has come from Amsterdam for school and is staying with his aunt. He makes friends: the ill and strange Ukai, the quiet Aso, and Mina, his aunt's daughter, who has tuberculosis. The young people swim, light fires, read poems and argue. The war is coming and all of them are of an age to be called up. Nobuhiko Obayashi directs, from Kazuo Dan's novel. The story of the production is part of the narrative. Obayashi had written the project forty years earlier and never made it; when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016 and given months, he decided to shoot it. The film was completed and he died in 2020. The visual language is deliberately artificial. The backgrounds are painted, the colours are not natural, the actors are placed in the frame like figures in a picture and the sky keeps changing. Obayashi does it in order to refuse reality. The subject is youth before a war. The characters are played not by actors in their twenties but by much older ones, a choice that creates an unsettling distance. It runs over three hours. It counts as part of Obayashi's anti war trilogy and is cited as the most personal work of his career. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese experimental cinema and formally extreme films. Who it is not for: it is very long, the visual density is exhausting, and the narrative does not advance at all in the conventional sense.