The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
If there is one true law of cinema, let it be this: any movie called Happiness is almost certainly using that title ironically.
For the first few minutes of Happiness, it actually seems like they’re setting the stage for a comedy, if a rather bleak one. The quiet Mr. Kanzaki comes to a town where even the sky itself seems hopelessly despondent. He offers the morose citizens use of a helmet that helps them relive their happiest memories.
The comedy starts with Kanzaki himself, a rumpled little man who constantly seems to be receding into himself. His technique for enticing customers is to just wander up to people and ask them if they can remember their happiest memory, before politely offering them use of the helmet, which he may or not may explain the purpose of, depending. The helmet itself is a delightfully analog contraption, seemingly made up mostly of a copper pot and typewriter key presses.
And as funny as it is when a woman slowly slides away from Kanzaki as he awkwardly attempts to initiate a conversation, it’s even funnier when most of the others turn out to be so full of an aimless black despair that they may as well put on a stranger’s mind-altering helmet.
There’s a deadpan absurdity to the nature of the memories, from the middle aged man who relives (and acts out) his hitting a home run in little league baseball, to the middle aged woman whose happiest memory appears to be doing the robot during a talent show.
Hang on to those laughs; you’re going to need them where we’re going…
Once word gets out that the helmet actually works, Mr. Kanzaki becomes a local celebrity, and the mayor instantly think of him as the man who can revitalize their economy with his invention, and bring joy back into the lives of its citizens. But it may not surprise you to discover that Kanzaki in fact has his own reasons for coming to the town, and his own agenda. And it may not be as altruistic as one might hope…
All of the above describes the first twenty or so minutes of the film. Not long after that, the real reason for Kanzaki’s being in town is revealed, and the movie takes a turn towards the dark side.
And this is where the movie, to a certain extent, falls apart: his reason for being in town.
The problem with Happiness doesn’t come from that tone shift; it’s actually a much simpler problem – the story itself (which is quite good) can’t maintain itself for the duration of the running time. It’s a great idea as a short film, but not nearly dense enough for feature length.
All credit to the creators, though: when the movie takes that turn, it doesn’t feel as abrupt or as jarring as it could have in lesser hands, and in fact the end of the movie seems inevitable in retrospect. But the entire second act is taken up with what ultimately feels like an unnecessary flashback.
We see the event that started everything (which, frankly, would have been better left to the imagination), and we see how Kanzaki reacts in the aftermath, and (briefly) the process of him inventing the helmet. The problem is, it all feels redundant; the incident in question paralyzes Kanzaki in a state of despair, which means that for thirty minutes, we’re just watching him stumble around, being deeply, deeply sad. There’s no progression, only stasis, and it’s deadly to the pacing.
There is nothing we learn in that thirty minutes that isn’t already manifest in the excellent performance by Masatoshi Nagase. He unpeels they layers of the quiet character we meet at the start of the film, who seems so shy and self-effacing (he can barely bring himself look up from the ground to make eye contact with anyone), almost imperceptibly shifting him from anodyne oddball to a man whose almost inconceivable sense of heartache has hollowed him out and sharpened him into a pinpoint.
Which, in the end, isn’t what we think it will be. The unwieldy stasis of the second act is nearly redeemed by the unpredictable outcome that makes up the film’s conclusion. Kanazki’s final interactions and ultimate goals are not entirely what we might have assumed from previous iterations of this type of story, and that adds a kind of thwarted humanity to what could have been a rather schematic revenge story.
So as a whole, Happiness doesn’t quite work. But to some, that may not even matter; the film is so stylishly directed, it goes a long way towards reducing the negative impact of its structural flaws. Director Sabu, a director/actor and possibly the only person on Earth who has played a role in a Martin Scorcese movie AND voiced an episode of Sailor Moon, invests the film with a color scheme of greens and browns that really sells the bleak nature of the town at the start, and the mostly static camera (not unlike a Roy Andersson film, of all things) adds a subdued distance that only adds to that initial darkly comic feel.
Then, when the film twists, the color returns for the flashbacks, and the camera goes from locked to handheld, mirroring the fractured state of our hero in the aftermath of his life altering tragedy. It’s a simple, perhaps even predictable technique, but in the experienced Sabu’s hands, it’s wildly effective.
Happiness would have made a great short film; but as a feature, it’s merely good.
