Japanese Story

Directed by Sue Brooks, this Australian film opens with Sandy, a geologist, obliged to escort a Japanese businessman around iron ore mines in the Pilbara desert. Their first encounter is a disaster: he mistakes her for the driver and finds her brusque, while she finds him overly groomed and pointedly incurious about his surroundings, having turned up for a desert trip in a suit. When the vehicle bogs down in sand and they are stranded overnight, the relationship shifts. Then, in its final third, the film lurches somewhere unexpected and becomes a different film altogether. The producers formally asked the press not to reveal that turn, and one critic noted it made the film harder to sell. Roger Ebert called it that rare sort of film that is not about what happens but about what happens then, writing that the full arc of Toni Collette's performance only reveals itself at the end, and that the ending had been there from the beginning. It won eight awards at the 2003 AFI Awards, the most of any Australian production that year, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay and Best Actress for Collette. Who it's for: Admirers of Australian cinema that breaks genre expectation to work on grief and cultural distance. Who it's not for: Not for viewers who want the same film start to finish, since it deliberately changes ground midway.