What passes for countryside in Japan is often a vast sprawl of low-rise development: chain restaurants, big-box stores, gas stations and pachinko parlors. While there's no shortage of films that have tried to capture the ennui of life in such areas, the results are often as uninspiring as the locations they depict.
The title of "It's Boring Here, Pick Me Up" says it all, really, but director Ryuichi Hiroki's portrait of provincial life is a more complex coming-of-age story than most.
Set over a 10-year period, it follows the fortunes of a group of graduating high school students in Toyama Prefecture as they make the awkward, often disappointing transition to adulthood. It's based on a collection of interlinked stories by Mariko Yamauchi, which Hiroki and screenwriter Tomonari Sakurai have arranged into a loose, nonlinear narrative that's constantly darting backward and forward in time, only gradually revealing how everything fits together.