Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Neo Sora
Starring: Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi, Shirō Sano, Shina Peng
We're over half a decade past the 2019 setting of Blade Runner and we still haven't gotten our hover cars. What we have gotten is a slow creep towards what looks like a dystopian future and a scarily rapid rise in the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (the two are not mutually exclusive). Writer/director Neo Sora's narrative debut Happyend (following his documentary eulogy for his late father, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus), is set in a near future Tokyo that looks a lot like the 2019 Los Angeles of Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic. Giant images are projected onto the sides of towering skyscrapers and messages are broadcast in the skies above the city. But the creep towards dystopia has gained rapid pace as the country lurches towards a return to the fascism it rejected at the end of World War II.
The nation's ruling party is using the threat of an upcoming "once in a century" earthquake to suppress freedoms and spread xenophobia. The public is warned that foreigners will try to take advantage of the disaster, and immigrants are viewed with increasing suspicion.
Despite his Korean family having lived in Japan for four generations, teenager Kou (Yutiko Hidaka) still isn't considered Japanese. He's reminded of his outsider status by the police who harass him, picking him out of crowds with the aid of facial recognition technology, and by his teachers, who use it as a form of intimidation. Kou's best friend since childhood is Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), a carefree boy with none of Kou's worries. When Kou becomes involved in growing activism, Yuta displays a nihilistic attitude, mocking his friend for wasting his time on something they can't change. Wedded to their conflicting political outlooks, Yuta and Kou slowly drift apart.
Most of the drama takes place within Yuta and Kou's high school, which Sora uses a microcosm of this fictional but eerily relatable version of Japanese society. When a prank results in the destruction of the principal's new car, a surveillance system is installed that uses facial recognition to dish out social credit system style punishments for students found to be breaking rules. With Yuta and Kou the chief suspects in the prank, their beloved music room is dismantled. It becomes clear that any sort of personal expression, anything that marks the students as individuals, is being purposely crushed.
Happyend shares some elements with Masaki Nishiyama's recent J-horror The Invisible Half, which tackled Japanese xenophobia and its targeting of outsiders. The two schools featured in the films are practically identical in their construction, all large glass windows that make it impossible for students to hide away from prying eyes and camera lenses. When a military figure is brought in to teach self defence lessons, all non-Japanese students are asked to leave the room "for the safety of Japanese citizens," leading to a revolt that sees the principal's office occupied by young protestors. A new crop of young Japanese filmmakers are seeking to highlight that something is rotten in their country.
For all its societal bleakness, Happyend is focussed on teenagers determined to live in the moment and express their personalities. The film celebrates teenage rebellion, even at the risk of older viewers frowning at some of the behaviour on display. The movie has a meandering episodic narrative, as though influenced by the teen comedies of late 20th century America. Indeed, the characters themselves look to the past for inspiration, aspiring DJ Yuta explaining how he digs for forgotten music from the past because no worthwhile music is being made in his lifetime. It's reflective of how so many of today's young people seem nostalgic for a time before they were born, bringing back vinyl and baggy '90s jeans.
This directionless plotting might be seen to go against the film's political themes, as the activism recedes into the background, suggesting a beaten down acceptance of these young people's fate. They say bleak times create great art. We haven't seen much evidence of that in the West, but an emerging new wave of Asian filmmakers might be the vanguard for kicking back against our willing surrender of individuality.
Happyend is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 19th.
