Seto and Utsumi

Seto and Utsumi sit by the river after school every day and talk. Usually the subject is nothing: word games, how to phrase a message to a girl, who laughed at what. Something genuinely serious comes up now and then, and neither of them dwells on it. The film is nothing but the conversation of these two boys. Directed by Tatsushi Ōmori, the production is adapted from a manga and plays out almost in a single location. The camera shoots the two of them sitting on the steps head-on, the setting does not change, nothing happens. The comedy comes entirely out of the rhythm of the talk, and the back-and-forth of the Kansai dialect is the engine. In seventy-five minutes it says a great deal while telling nothing. Sosuke Ikematsu and Masaki Suda play the pair.