'A Drop from Tomato': Planting the seeds of reconciliation

For independent filmmakers from elsewhere in Asia with high censorship or distribution hurdles, Japan must look like paradise. Last year, most of the 581 local films released here were low-budget indie titles. Hardly any of their makers got rich, but at least their films saw the theatrical light of day. But as illustrated by the troubled history of "A Drop from Tomato," a heart-warming drama by actor-director Hideo Sakaki, dozens of Japanese indie films fail to make the transition from production to release for years — or forever.

Filmed in 2012 with a cast headed by name actors Renji Ishibashi and Manami Konishi, "A Drop from Tomato" struggled to find a distributor. Selected for the 2015 edition of the Okuridashi Film Festival — a now-discontinued event showcasing "shelved" domestic films — "Tomato" won the Grand Prize and finally got an opening date.

So felicitations are in order — or are they? Like it or not, the film arrives in theaters labeled as "damaged goods." Sakaki and his backers are clearly hoping for a success that makes believers out of doubters. But my own reaction on a second viewing — I had first seen the film not long after its completion — was that there was less damage than over-ripeness: "Tomato" now feels past its sell-by date.

The story is a familiar one of inter-generational miscommunication. The twist, supplied by Sakaki and his co-scriptwriters, is that instead of the more familiar father-son or mother-daughter pairing, the film's central parent-child couple is Tatsuo (Ishibashi), an elderly widower living alone in the family home, and Sakura (Konishi), his estranged adult daughter, now working at a hair salon with her new husband and fellow stylist Makoto (Hisashi Yoshizawa).

Not that Tatsuo and Sakura initially spend much on-screen time together: Following her mother's death, Sakura, then a girl, discovered Tatsuo ripping up her mother's beloved tomato plants from their backyard garden. When she tried to stop him he shoved her aside, with no explanation. She now wants nothing to do with this insensitive monster.

Meanwhile, the now-mellowed Tatsuo has since become an enthusiastic tomato grower himself, in loving memory of his wife. But when Makoto suggests inviting him to the wedding party, Sakura strenuously objects. Ignorant of Tatsuo's change of heart, she still resents his apparent heartlessness when she was a child.

It's not hard to guess that Sakura and Tatsuo will reconcile by the credit crawl. In fact, it's all too obvious. So the film puts off the inevitable by making Sakura fly off the handle whenever the subject of Tatsuo arises, or when the man himself reenters her life. And the tight-lipped Tatsuo doesn't do much to advance his own cause. Rather than explanations and apologies, he silently offers Sakura, via Makoto, his homegrown tomatoes. She indignantly tosses them.

In his films before and since, including his 2008 hit "My Grandma" ("Boku no Obaachan"), Sakaki has used extreme actions and attitudes to starkly reveal hidden truths, but he is also prone to TV-drama-like simplification, with characters behaving like cartoons. Konishi's performance is one example, as she veers from gap-mouthed bliss to loudly ranting over Makoto's well-meaning attempts at peace-making. I was half expecting her to insert her fingers in her ears.

By contrast, the veteran Ishibashi, who has often been cast as amoral outlaws or cold-blooded villains, plays Tatsuo as a lonely old guy with a stoic exterior but a gentle spirit. Like so many other Japanese screen dads, he may be a bad communicator, but he is also hard to dislike, even when he is giving a little girl a feel-good lesson in tomato cultivation. ("If you tell them 'be happy,' " he informs her, "they will grow faster.")

Any other actor, I may have wanted to strangle; Ishibashi, however, I wanted to cheer, at least for lowering the film's sugar count. I did want to sample those scrumptious-looking tomatoes, but the garden-variety pep talks, I'll leave to him.