Director: Neo Sora
Writer: Neo Sora
Stars: Hayato Kurihara, Yukito Hidaka, Yuta Hayashi
Synopsis: A near-future Tokyo awaits destruction as the city is rocked by a series of foreshocks that predict a larger, more disastrous quake on the horizon. With the anxiety looming over them, a group of teenage best friends and musicians get into typical teenager trouble that tests the strength of their relationships.
Plenty of powerful themes are at work in Neo Sora’s narrative debut, Happyend, but none shape the film’s dynamism quite like the angel and devil on every young person’s shoulder: acquiescence and anarchy, respectively. Quite early on in his self-described “story about the near future,” Sora makes this emphasis abundantly clear. The film’s first scene, which sees us meet the group of teenage besties in whom we’ll become invested as the story rolls along at an energetic pace, takes place at an underground nightclub, where Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), Kou (Yukito Hidaka), Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), Tomu (Arazi), and Ming (Shina Peng) are hoping to sneak in to watch one of their favorite DJ’s perform a techno-heavy set. Only Yuta and Kou make it inside, after posing as delivery men, and are able to enjoy a few minutes of music before police arrive to shut down the rave. While both boys agree it would be best to flee with the rest of the crowd, Yuta isn’t willing to end his night so soon after it began; he stays, listening to the beats he and his cohort admire so much, almost as if the longer his ears are trained on the pulsating bass, the closer his friends will get to having experienced it themselves. Even as the cops shout in his ear, telling him to leave, he stands proudly, bopping his head with the rhythm of the night.
Kou, on the other hand, leaves the club, his desire to hang back trumped by the need to keep his record clean. It’s a face-off between those aforementioned ideas, acquiescence and anarchy. And who among us hasn’t struggled to commit to one or the other as both played tug of war with our bearings? The thing about Sora’s film, however, is that the lines quickly become blurred in regards to what exactly constitutes obedience and rebellion; better yet, the two are considered as more complicated paths than what they present themselves to be. The further into Happyend we get, the more Kou defies authoritarian rule. But he does so in the form of lawful protest, not as an insurrectionist or a hateful rioter. Yuta, meanwhile, begins to act in accordance with the only thing he knows how to be: A disruptive prankster who can’t bear the fact that his best friends aren’t following the map they charted together.
What is, on its surface, a simple tale about a once-tight-knit group of students that find themselves being pulled in opposite directions as they stare down the end of their high school careers, Happyend is a film with a lot on its mind, a familiar characteristic for a first-time work of fiction. But Sora has a distinct command of his many trains of thought that allows his narrative to maintain cohesion despite its many ideas. That they blend together nicely and thus aren’t competing for space helps matters, as an over-abundance of plot can often derail even the most straightforward frameworks. Yet Sora’s film – a story about relationships told with a futuristic backdrop that doesn’t distract from its primary point, instead adding a wrinkle to its routine conceit – manages to avoid the fate of a lesser work with a similar amount of ideas. The substance his concepts carry make their inclusions worthwhile.
The near-future Tokyo in which Happyend takes place isn’t all that unrecognizable; cars don’t fly and teleportation isn’t readily available for the wealthy elite. Yuta, Kou, and co. tend to walk to school. They spend a great deal of time in their “Music Research Club” headquarters, a room that is smaller than any true music classroom should be but larger than a storage closet, so it will do. Really, what makes their surroundings stand out is a number of clever details that Sora conceived so as to distinguish the peculiar from the pedestrian. There are television-like billboards that humorously toggle between news of the country’s prime minister being attacked to a 20-percent-off sale on canned goods. The police force can obtain information about a person’s background just by scanning their face with a cell phone. (Here’s hoping Tim Cook isn’t much of a cinephile.) Most prominent of all, though, is the surveillance system that the school’s principal (Sano Shirô) installs in the film’s first act, one that assigns every student a code and monitors their movements and actions in order to deduct a certain number of points from their overall score. Known as “Panopty,” its formula isn’t ever fully explained, but it doesn’t require a detailed instruction manual. Given the digitized fortress the city has become, it’s easily understood that this is but another way for authority figures to control their underlings, particularly the youth.
Again, these details are imperative to the story, but never distract from what Sora has his mind on from the get-go. Happyend never loses sight of the fact that the relationships between its characters are what drives the story forward; the evolving collective friendship between the film’s fab five remains the most interesting element here, even with all of the bells and whistles Sora has at his disposal. Yuta’s plan for him and his friends to rule the pranking world together rapidly comes undone as all of his friends begin to find new outlooks on the future. Kou develops a crush on Fumi (Kilala Inori) and begins to take part in the activist events she organizes, a profound personal journey for a young man that leads to one of the movie’s strongest sequences, a sit-in conducted by 15-plus students inside the principal’s office. Tomu is about to move to America; Ata-chan and Ming are flirting up a storm, and a budding relationship seems inevitable.
With a future as uncertain as the one the film’s fivesome is staring down, that it is disrupted in the eyes of the one character who has the least to fret over – Yuta’s family is particularly wealthy, and his parents are often out of the house – brings a tension to the proceedings that might otherwise feel nonexistent given the playful tone that exists throughout. Shot by Bill Kirstein, who shot Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, a documentary that serves as a swan song for the brilliant composer – who also happens to be the director’s father – many of these themes are captured indelibly in some of the year’s best shots. We see two boys standing on opposite sides of the street, in different lighting, a shot that might be considered overt and on-the-nose if not for its raw beauty (especially when paired with Lia Ouyang Rusli’s techno score, a marvel). The film is littered with images like this; you want to put the entire thing in a frame to hang for all to see.
Furthermore, each character’s individual intricacies are wisely rendered to provide Happyend with an undercurrent that is not just political, but sociopolitical. For instance, Tomu is Black and struggles with his identity in a country where few others look like him. Kou is Korean, and despite his family having lived in Tokyo for the better part of 40 years, their restaurant is consistently vandalized in an effort to remind the community that it isn’t an authentic Japanese business. He’s also the first person the school’s principal looks toward when anything goes wrong, casual racism that never goes unnoticed by the boy subjected to it, his youth never clouding the fact that he is viewed as a troublesome outsider.
If the film sounds as though it’s light on plot, that’s not a reflection of its activity level, instead a sign of its ostensible simplicity. As it continues, Happyend becomes a film primarily about the dilemma between youth and adulthood, and how goals transcend the typical boundaries age can force us to operate within. It goes without saying that maturation changes one’s view on the world and the people in it, but Happyend exists as a moving testament to the idea that, despite the cracks that form in our strongest connections. Its title may not hint precisely to its outcome; sometimes mutual understanding is as happy an end as one can be. Better yet, the happiest ends might be ellipses; continuation may or may not be certain, but the option is enough to hold out hope for.