Parks:
Written and directed by Natsuki Seta. Starring: Ai Hasimoto, Mei Nagano,
Shota Sometani, Shizuka Ishibashi, Ryu Morioka.
Running Time: 118
minutes.
Rating:
3/4
Parks, just the second feature film
directed Natsuki Seta, a protégé of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is the sort of
adventurous, experimental film that I wish more directors, young or old, would
attempt to make. It’s a tribute to a
100-year-old park that throws in chapter titles, a mystery, a romance, dream
sequences, and (because why not) a massive dance number. It constantly seeks to bend the rules of
storytelling and blurs the line between reality and fantasy in ways that,
thankfully, work more often than not, making this film one of the more
enjoyably unique experiences I had at Nippon Connection 2017.
The
core thread of the story is Jun’s efforts to finish her Communication Studies
thesis. Bereft of a topic, her
inspiration comes when a strange girl appears at her doorstep, claiming that an
old flame of her father’s lived in this same apartment once upon a time. Intrigued, Jun joins her in her search for
the woman’s identity, and soon meets said woman’s grandson (the woman herself
has passed away). Together, they uncover
a demo reel of a love song that the girl’s father apparently wrote for this
woman when they were still an item, inspired by the park they all live near. The demo is damaged, though, and they can
only hear part of the song, so they decide to put their heads together and try
to finish it in time for a special music festival to celebrate the 100th
anniversary of the park’s dedication.
This
is a relentlessly upbeat film, breezy and fun; not even a breakup can get
anyone down for very long in this world.
This can come close at times to making the film too unrealistic or insufferable,
but the actors are so dedicated that it never crosses that particular
line. The male character, whose name I
honestly can’t recall for the life of me, is an aspiring rapper, and his
terrible lyrics are a regular annoyance, but thankfully he’s not the focus of
the show.
What
really makes the film hard to pick apart is when it breaks through normal
storytelling conventions. The girl who
enters Jun’s life is obsessed with finding out more about her father (her goal
is to write a book about him), and soon these figures from the past enter the
film as characters in and of themselves that she talks and interacts with. Is she dreaming? Hallucinating? Or is some legit transgression of the laws of
physics taking place, allowing her to cross time and dimensions? Is, perhaps, the entire film simply a figment
of her imagination?
To
the film’s credit, these bizarre tangents jibe well with the tone of the rest
of the film, and it never tries to explain any of it. Any attempt to have all this make sense would
inevitably be a let-down from whatever the viewer wishes to dream up, and
seriousness is not how these people roll, man.
Parks is brought down by, occasionally, being
a bit too unhinged for its own good, but though it occasionally comes close, it
never falls apart entirely. It is a compelling
and mysterious experience, and even the chances it takes that don’t work are
worthy ones. Natsuki Seta might not have
quite stuck the landing this time around, but I am confident that one day, she
is going to truly blow our minds.
-Noah Franc
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