Japanese Story (2003) Movie Review

I just did a little research. According to my Encyclopaedia Britannica Atlas, there are 852 people per square mile in Japan. In Australia, on the other hand, there are 5.9 people per square mile. How odd it must be to travel from one to the other. That would be a little like me, someone who lives in Scotland (169 people per square mile), travelling to the moon.

This gargantuan difference is the set up for “Japanese Story,” a new Australian film that is about human nature, love, cultural differences… and other things too, that I should not mention in a review, because you need to discover them for yourselves. It is also about the vast, heartless, beautiful expanse of the Australian outback. I can think of few other films where emptiness was better suggested.

Tachibana Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) is a businessman visiting Japan as a representative of his company, who wish to invest in the land there. He drives through the endless desert, listening to American music, looking shyly handsome, and amazed at his surroundings. He gets out of his car to take a photo of himself against this beautiful, ominous, backdrop.

He is given a tour of the areas of interest by Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette),a geologist, who, at first, would rather be somewhere else (she is unsure initially which of Tachibana’s names is his first name). He is treated differently by different people. Some people try and make him feel welcome by attempting to adopt Japanese customs (they get him drunk on sake and get him up on the karaoke floor: he later tells Sandy that he hates karaoke). Others label him by his appearance, muttering about the war, as if he is accountable for his country’s actions sixty years ago.

On the telephone to his boss, Tachibana expresses his concern about Sandy (in Japanese, so she can’t understand), calling her ‘stubborn.’ He’s one to talk. When Sandy consents to take him miles away into the outback just so he can have a look around, he tells her to keep going, along a dirt path, despite her protests. Why is he so determined to get farther and farther into this abyss?

They get stuck, in a bog in that dirt path that Sandy never wanted to drive along. He thinks it’s fine; they’ll get out of this. She, however, knows more about this land than he does. ‘People die out here… frequently!’ she exclaims. They have to stay the night in the cold desert.

We know where this is going. We’ve seen movies like this before. They’ll become friends, then more-than-friends, and they’ll live, no doubt, happily ever after.

They do become friends (as they learn more about each others cultures, Sandy explains to Tachibana ‘it’s pronounced desert, not dessert’). And they do become more-than-friends, sharing a sex scene that is both erotic and a little unusual (members of IMDB express doubt that it is wise to make love where the edge of a zipper is involved).

Something happens later that you do not expect, and the ending becomes more moving than you anticipate. I’ll say no more of it, because it should be experienced first hand. However, I will say this: consider how at the turning-point Sue Brooks, the film’s director, chooses not to use music in the scene of action (where it would be used in a typical Hollywood movie) but to use it in the following scene (a scene which wouldn’t even be included in a typical Hollywood movie). This makes the scene easily the most effective in the movie: one of surprising power and emotion in a movie that we think we can second-guess.

The film is imperfect: it rushes a little too quickly into that sex scene, and the last shot is too long by about half. Yet the movie is sort of fascinating, and sometimes deeply moving. It looks, at first, a bit like a movie that will give all the answers, but by the end we realise that it asks many unanswered questions. Are we sure of all the character’s motivations? Is this a film about morals? Did Sandy do anything wrong? Did Tachibana? Should they have acted differently? Could they? Do the characters have regrets? Here is a film (not unlike “Lost in Translation,” another film featuring culture differences) that develops its characters well, but also lets us fill some of them in ourselves.

And I can’t stop thinking about the difference in population density between Japan and Australia. What makes you feel more insignificant: being dwarfed by nature, or by the massive crowds of over-populated cities? Your guess is as good as mine.