Once you get past a certain point in life, the chance of finding new love must feel as remote as getting struck by lightning — or a meteorite, for that matter.
Single and newly sober, 49-year-old Fumi (Satomi Kobayashi), the protagonist of Hideyuki Hirayama’s “Tsuyukusa,” is driving home from an alcohol support group when her car is hit by a tiny space rock. It leaves her vehicle flipped on its side, and seems to throw her determinedly mundane life out of kilter, too.
She’s been living in a quiet seaside town on the Izu Peninsula, where she works at a textile factory and spends her days off hanging out with a co-worker’s astronomy-obsessed son, Kohei (Taiyo Saito). Her reasons for wanting to spend so much time with a boy four decades her junior gradually become clear as the film progresses, and its layers of comic whimsy drift away to reveal a deeper well of hurt.