What is your worst nightmare? In this Internet age, public shaming by misdirected tweet or surreptitious smartphone snap has come to rank high. Of course, the sex video that just happens to go viral has propelled more than one "victim" to stardom (or at least a reality-show version of it), but far more reputations have been tarnished by Web notoriety, however temporary or local.
Based on Misumi Kubo's award-winning novel, Yuki Tanada's "Fugainai Boku wa Sora wo Mita (The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky)" examines the fallout from one such shaming, but for all the nowness of its topic, the film is not exploitative. Instead, Tanada has portrayed her teenage hero and his housewife lover as real-life combinations of good and bad, strong and weak, admirable and contemptible.
Most of all, they are ordinary people who, whatever happens, get up the next morning and live through the day (though some spend it with the blanket over their head). Tanada's theme, in fact, is less the depths to which we humans can fall than our amazing tenacity. We just keep coming, disaster after disaster, generation after generation.