Nobuhiro Yamashita scored an international hit in 2005 with "Linda, Linda, Linda," a comic drama about a schoolgirl band whose lead singer drops out just before a big school festival. When it was screened at the Udine Far East Film Festival last year, the audience whooped with laughter at its deadpan humor, cheered the rousing concert finale and, when Yamashita stood for his bows, gave him a 10-minute standing ovation. And at the dozens of festivals around the world where "Linda, Linda, Linda" screened that reaction was apparently fairly typical.
Logically, Yamashita should have taken his newfound international cred to a money-bags foreign producer to finance his new crowd-pleasing comedy. Instead he made "Matsugane Ransha Jiken (Matsugane Potshot Incident)," a quirky seriocomic mystery that featured a grown man forcing sex on a mentally disabled girl and a yakuza and his moll bullying a small-town loser. Not many belly laughs in that material, though the film had a few funny bits in the signature Yamashita style. "Matsugane" played the international festival circuit, but did not get anything like "Linda, Linda, Linda" 's rapturous reception.
Now Yamashita is back with "Tennen Kokkeko (A Gentle Breeze in the Village)," a seishun eiga (youth film) based on a girls' manga by Fusako Kuramochi. Set in a remote area of Shimane Prefecture in western Japan, where children are disappearing and time seems to have stopped, the film has no slap-the-armrest gags whatsoever. Rather it is Yamashita's gentle-spirited celebration of the sort of slow-paced, human-centered childhood and youth that may be familiar to generations past, but is becoming a rarity in today's hyper, wired Japan, where teens source more friends online than in the flesh — and discard them as casually as last month's fashions.