Kawa no soko kara konnichi wa / Sawako Decides
Ishii Yuya, Japan
2009, 112 min
International Premiere
14 February 2010
Delphi Filmpalast, Berlin
Cast: Mitsushima Hikari (Sawako), Endo Masashi (Kenichi), Aihara Kira (Kayoko), Shiga Kotaro (Sawakos Vater Tadao), Iwamatsu Ryo (Nobuo).
After five years, five jobs, and five boyfriends, Sawako (Mitsushima Hikari) still has not fully arrived in Tokyo. Her favorite phrases are “can’t be helped” and “working class is why.”
On breaks from her humiliating job at a toy company, Sawako listens to two co-workers discuss men, climate change, and the global financial crisis with the same hilarious apathy. They pursue Sawako everywhere, even chiding her about her middling boyfriend while she sits on the toilet.
Kenichi (Endo Masashi), a toy designer at the toy company, has determined to live an “eco lifestyle.” Sawako spends evenings with him and his daughter Kayoko (Ahira Kira), while he clumsily knits a sweater vest, baby blue like his own, intended for Sawako. Instead of a good-night kiss at her door, Kenichi asks Sawako for her empty cans to recycle.
When his latest design – a plastic Ma on wheels – fails miserably in focus group, Kenichi decides he and Sawako should return to her home town and run her seriously ill father’s clam-packing business. Considered an ungrateful daughter by the factory women, however, Sawako doesn’t seem to stand a chance against their verbal abuse and general uncooperativeness.
But in Sawako Decides (literal translation of the Japanese title is “Hello From the River Bed”), we learn the power of a “lower-middling woman” – chu no ge no on-na. After a long, painful recovery from the most comically literal rendition of a “painful memory” I’ve seen, Sawako decides that since she’s nothing special, she’ll just have to tough it out.
With this newly defiant mediocrity, Sawako confronts the factory women and starts to re-invent the family business, beginning with a rewrite of the Kimura Shellfisheries workers’ morning pep song into a surly “Internationale” for the modern worker.
Talking about his commercial film debut, director Ishii Yuya has said: “Sawako Decides is my answer to the question of how can we live robustly without losing hope in this age":
“In the film, the word ‘working class’ is used. No matter what they do, they are unable to excel and only think of themselves as ‘less than the average person.’ I first wanted to depict the semblance of such people who become defiant, strong, and rebellious; of people who come to resist against something.”
Yuya may have hit on the trope of the decade with his observation that “the image of small shellfish squirming in the riverbed also contains a hopeless gravity that was a perfect fit.” He says his influences are musical even more than cinematic, and I believe him; Sawako Decides is wonderfully paced. And Mitsushima Hikari is an expressive, physically precise comic genius.
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