Following her triumph in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” as a silent but knowing driver to Hidetoshi Nishijima’s conflicted theater director, Toko Miura is garnering lead roles that showcase her considerable talents.
Her latest turn is in “Trapped Balloon,” a cliche-ridden first feature scripted and helmed by TV commercial director Hiroyuki Miyagawa. In this film, she plays Rinko, a former teacher who has returned to her native island in the Seto Inland Sea after falling into a depression. This storyline is hardly new: Every other contemporary Japanese film set in the countryside features a protagonist who once dreamed of escaping their hometown but now finds themself back where they started, tail between legs.
Also familiar is the film’s parallel story centered on Kenji (Masahiro Higashide), an island fisherman who lost his wife and child in a landslide caused by a torrential downpour and has since withdrawn from the world. Inspired by a similar disaster that struck Miyagawa’s native Hiroshima Prefecture and nearby areas in 2018, this narrative is the latest in a long line of Japanese films that mine cinematic drama from natural calamities.