Who is Suomi? What is she? The eponymous protagonist of Koki Mitani’s “All About Suomi” enthralls everyone she meets, though they all seem to remember her differently.
When detective Keigo Kusano (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is summoned to the home of a wealthy poet whose wife has vanished, presumably kidnapped, his interest in the case is more than just professional. The missing woman, Suomi (Masami Nagasawa), is Keigo’s former spouse — and he’s not the only one.
Soon enough, her three other ex-husbands converge on the property: Keigo’s boss, Mamoru (Takashi Kobayashi); a green-haired YouTuber going by the name Zaemon Tokachi (Tori Matsuzaka); and Daikichi (Kenichi Endo), Suomi’s former junior-high teacher, now surreptitiously working as her groundskeeper.
All of them are less blase about her disappearance than her current husband, Shizuo (Bando Yajuro), who’s clearly only interested in himself. Yet when they start comparing notes, it transpires that there are wild disparities between how they each remember her. One Suomi is a klutz in the kitchen, but another is a culinary whiz; a third, weirdly, speaks nothing but Mandarin.
Appearing mostly in flashback, Nagasawa gets to look fabulous in a range of outfits, at one point even playing a schoolgirl Suomi and her flighty mother, side by side. Even as she switches between guises, she’s always unmistakably herself, though that’s kind of the point. Emma Miyazawa, playing a friend and accomplice named Azami, demonstrates a shape-shifting versatility that isn’t required from the film’s top-billed star.
Mitani has described the movie as a return to his stage roots, with its story confined mostly to a single location. Unusually for a Japanese production, he started rehearsing his cast a month before shooting began, the result being that they function as a genuine ensemble rather than a rabble of egos trying to outdo one another.
The script for “All About Suomi” freely borrows from Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” (1963); the police even rig Shizuo’s phone to an archaic reel-to-reel tape recorder like the one Tatsuya Nakadai used in that film. A less obvious reference might be Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann,” in which the poet hero’s various lost loves turn out to have been facets of the same woman.
Suomi may shine brightly enough to inspire a legion of admirers, but the film itself sometimes lacks sparkle. Mitani’s script isn’t on the level of his best work, too often relying on slapstick rather than verbal wit. This tale of fluid identities might have touched on some deeper themes, perhaps posing tricky questions about the roles women are forced to play, but Mitani is happier to revel in the artifice.
Coming from a director renowned for his cinephilia, the movie is surprisingly dowdy. Shizuo’s mansion — where most of the action takes place — is a convincing shrine to bad taste, but it’s painful to look at (and indifferently lit, too). A scrappy song-and-dance finale, modeled on golden-age MGM musicals, ends things on a damp note.
But before that, the film delivers its coup de grace during a final act in which Suomi stops existing purely in the memories of her male admirers. In a show-stopping scene, Nagasawa cycles through her multiple personae in real time — and walks away with the entire movie. Suomi may be different things to different people, but she’s her own woman.
| Rating | |
|---|---|
| Run Time | 114 mins. |
| Language | Japanese |
| Opens | Sept. 13 |
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