Watching Neo Sora’s debut feature “Happyend,” a coming-of-age film set in the near future, I was reminded of stories I’d heard from my wife about her Tokyo high school, which was shut down for weeks in the turbulent 1960s by student protesters. But instead of battling cops on the streets, she served as the president of a Beatles fan club and saw “A Hard Day’s Night” about 30 times.
Scripted by Sora, the film draws a similar contrast between social turmoil outside the confines of an upscale urban high school as a major earthquake looms and the personal lives of its students, from a practical joke they play to annoy their principal (a wonderfully caustic Shiro Sano) to the tight but troubled friendship of the two main protagonists.
If anything, the film’s kids view potential disaster and present oppression by shadowy xenophobic authorities with something less than life-or-death urgency, as though they were seeing it from inside a bubble. This makes their semi-dystopian world and its discontents feel more like metaphors than anything present and real.
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