Swing Girls

At a rural high school a group of girls spoil the lunch boxes they are carrying to the baseball team and the entire brass band goes down with food poisoning. A stand-in ensemble has to be assembled, and the job falls to the lazy students who volunteered to get out of class. None of them plays anything. They are handed big band instruments. The subject is not talent but reluctant people beginning to want something. The girls are there at first only to skip lessons; the music catches them slowly and the film does not rush the turn. The form follows the familiar route exactly: incompetence, collapse, recovery and the big performance. Its honesty lies in not hiding the template. The most notable thing about the production is that the playing is real. The cast trained for months and perform the instruments themselves; live playing was chosen over miming, which explains where the energy of the final sequence comes from. Shinobu Yaguchi applied the same idea a second time here after Waterboys, which he built around male swimmers. Juri Ueno leads, and the film won her the newcomer prize at the Japanese Academy awards. Who it is for: viewers who like good-natured, crowded school comedies with music. Who it is not for: anyone after surprise; where the story is going is clear within ten minutes.