Wood Job!

Yuki failed his university entrance exam, his girlfriend left him and he has no plan. He sees a leaflet: a forestry training programme. He applies because of the photograph of a girl on the leaflet. The programme is in a village up in the mountains with a weak connection to the city. On the first day Yuki drops the axe, a leech gets him and he tries to run. The bus passes once a week. He has to stay a year. Cutting trees, planting them, reading the mountain and learning the village's rules all take time. Shinobu Yaguchi directs and adapted the script from a novel by Shion Miura. Shota Sometani, Hideaki Ito, Masami Nagasawa and Yuka are in the cast. It is a Japanese production. The film shows forestry work in detail; the felling, hauling and planting were shot with real methods. The matter it treats is the length of labour; a planted tree needs a hundred years before it is cut, and nobody cuts what he planted himself. The film does not romanticise village life; the flies, the mud and the hard work are inside the narrative. The narrative moves through comedy and keeps its dramatic weight light. The festival sequence in the village is its most spectacular scene. Yaguchi is known for films about a clumsy group learning a craft, and this is in the same mould. At the end the narrative asks plainly whether to go back to the city. The ending reaches no large decision. Its limit is predictability; the mould is familiar, the characters simple, and the ending mild. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese comedy and films about a trade. Who it is not for: it is predictable, light, and the ending ordinary.