Fantasia Report: Always: Sunset On Third Street Review
Call it the Titanic Syndrome but whenever word comes out of a film sweeping film awards the assumption tends to be that it has done so by playing to the lowest possible common denominator, by glossing things up to a polished sheen and hoping by doing so to distract the audience from the fact that they're being shamelessly manipulated. And, honestly, Takashi Yamazaki's Always – winner of twelve of thirteen total awards offered in Japan's version of the Oscars and the winner of the Audience Choice award at the 2006 New York Asian Film Festival, the film available on DVD here – does exactly that. A wildly nostalgic film with a palpable ache for simpler days gone by Always reaches for every possible emotional button, flips every switch, practically begs you to follow where Yamazaki wants to lead. Subtle it is not but it is, however, blessed with strong enough characters and enough grace points that you are more than willing to forgive the occasional excess in favor of the larger whole. Always is such a polished, poised and consistent piece of work that it is hard to believe that it is from the same man who made the occasionally entertaining but wildly inconsistent Returner.
Set in 1958 Tokyo Always is at least as much about capturing a soft focused memory of a past time and age as it is about narrative. The film aims to capture a city and a nation on the cusp of major change, with the under construction Tokyo Tower standing as the primary image for the push to modernization. This is Tokyo just emerging from the shadow of the war, Japan moving from its old ways into the new and modern era with both the excitements of change and the faint tinges of loss as the old ways pass. This is an era where entire neighborhoods would turn out when someone nearby bought a television set, where a fridge was a strange and wondrous thing, where Coca Cola was first appearing on the market and rockabilly filled the airwaves. An era filled with people trying to put the memory of the past behind them – an era, in fact, filled with children who have no direct knowledge of their violent near past – and filled with hope and optimism for a better future, a future that seems to be just on the cusp of arriving.
Representing this era, these feelings, are the residents of one small Tokyo neighborhood. We start with Mutsuko, the country girl newly arrived in the big city to take a job. That job turns out, unexpectedly, to be as a mechanic in a small auto body shop, a job that Mutsuko is woefully unqualified for, much to the chagrin of her tempermental boss Suzuki. Mutsuko becomes a surrogate member of the Suzuki house, joining the patriarch, his wife and nine year old son Ippei, who daily grills his mother on when their new television set will arrive. Across the street from the Suzuki's lives Chagawa, a struggling writer who has failed to find any success writing 'literature' and who is forced to eke out a living writing low paying children's adventure stories for a monthly magazine while also running a run down candy shop inherited from a dead aunt. Thanks to some drunken boasting aimed at impressing newly arrived dancer turned barmaid Hiromi, Chagawa becomes a surrogate father to Junnosuke, an abandoned and unwanted boy who has been turned out by his mother – an old acquaintance of Hiromi's – who is viewed as nothing more than a nuisance until it turns out that he is a great fan of Chagawa's adventure stories and the two slowly develop an unspoken but deeply felt bond. Also in the mix are the trend tracking, tobacco shop owning granny and the local doctor, still struggling to overcome the death of his wife and daughter in the war time fire bombing of Tokyo.
Though Yamazaki certainly crosses the line between sweet and cloying from time to time – Mutsuko is too often given nothing to do but play the spunky teen girl, and a closing sequence between Chagawa and Junnosuke is so flagrantly staged to tug on the heartstrings 'til they threaten to snap that it is barely excusable – the excesses are easy to forgive because Always is so obviously heartfelt, the emotions are big and broad but they are also clearly genuinely felt by all involved. The film does a remarkable job of taking seemingly stock characters and gradually developing them into full blooded, three dimensional people. You become willing to go where they lead because you genuinely care about these people and their lives, which is no small feat for a film that runs well over two hours with very little plot to speak of. Always plays like memory, little stories and vignettes unspooling with all of the nasty bits edited out wit only the highlights remaining. It is by turns funny, sincere, heartrending and wistful; a film that values family, wherever you may find it, above all else and changes emotional gears easily and often. Much of the early press focused largely on Yamazaki's incredibly detailed recreation of historic Tokyo – he was offered the job initially thanks to his extensive special effects background – and while that technical aspect of the film is truly remarkable Yamazaki has clearly learned from the mistakes of Returner and keeps the focus here squarely on the characters rather than the effects.
The recently released Japanese DVD is excellent, as you would expect for such a high profile release. The transfer is anamorphic and very strong, audio comes in 2.0, 5.1 and DTS varieties, and the English subtitles are excellent – even capturing some of the quirks of dialect when Mutsuko is freshly arrived in Tokyo. In all a very strong presentation for a film that reminds that aiming for mass appeal is not necessarily a bad thing.
