A generation ago, not a few Japanese filmmakers fell under the spell of Takeshi Kitano’s punchy, minimalist style. Some even made what were essentially Kitano films by proxy.
Similarly, I’ve been seeing more simulacrums of the pastel-colored, artfully stylized worlds of Wes Anderson in Japanese films, the latest being Satoko Yokohama’s “Seaside Serendipity,” a picaresque summertime ramble set in an unnamed coastal town.
Yokohama’s 2009 offbeat romance “Bare Essence of Life” also unfolded in a provincial burg, but that film’s harshness and strangeness (Kenichi Matsuyama’s eccentric farmer showers himself with insecticide, for example) have given way to a softly colorful semi-fantasy land where artists are given free rein and even hard, cold cash to realize their dreams. Not quite the world as we know it, that is.
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