Self-improvement in the sugar cane

Getting away from it all means different things to different people, doesn't it? Your dream vacation may be a hammock on a tropical beach; mine is trudging up Mount Fuji with 10,000 other hikers (mainly because I'm a masochist and can't afford the air fare to the tropical beach).

But how many people, masochists included, would voluntarily fly to a tiny island off Okinawa and chop sugar cane for one month? In Tetsuo Shinohara's "Shinkokyu no Hitsuyo (The Necessity of Deep Breathing)," the answer is Japanese twentysomethings who want to refreshen their hearts and minds under the blue Okinawan sky . . . or something like that. Because what is clear from the beginning about Shinohara's seven cane-cutting heroes is they have pasts they want to hide, demons they hope to exorcise.

This may sound like dull psychodrama (postadolescents baring their souls in the cane fields), but Shinohara makes the job and all that goes with it look bone-achingly, even attractively, real. And this is not the first time. In 1993 he released "Kusa no Ue no Shigoto (Work On the Grass)," a 16-mm short feature about two men sent to cut a field of grass in the middle of nowhere. In that film he portrayed the relationship between a cool professional "lawn-mower man" and a bumbling writer with the precision of one who has been there himself, who knows why what looks, from the outside, like mindless drudgery can be a kind of bliss. It's a movie that makes you want to flop into a pile of heavenly smelling cut grass and stare up at the clouds.