Swing Girls (2004)

aka Suwingu gâruzu

After accidentally poisoning their school’s brass band through the power of raw fish, heat and tardiness, a group of girls decide it’s best to roll with the punches and use this opportunity to get out of their summer school maths class by replacing the original band members.

The problem: apart from the still standing cymbal player of the original band Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka) who is actually a pretty decent piano player, most of the girls do not play an instrument or are actually motivated to learn music – at least at first. There aren’t enough members for a proper brass band anyway, but a swing big band seems somewhat doable to Takuo.

Despite keeping up appearances for teenage disengagement, some of the girls really do take to the whole band thing, and even when the return of the real brass players should put a stop to their band ambitions, a hard core around Tomoko (Juri Ueno, doing some of the choicest cute camera hogging known to humanity) and Takuo decide to continue turning into a band that might even manage to keep time.

Swing Girls’ director Shinobu Yaguchi is something of a specialist in the very specifically Japanese kind of feelgood movie where a group of people of dubious talent and motivation come to learn to work together to achieve something quite special.

At its worst, this sort of thing can feel disingenuous and downright unpleasant and unkind towards the many, many people who fail at things and never manage to play an awesome version of “Take the A-Train” without any fault of their own.

At its best – and Swing Girls certainly is this sub-genre at its best – these films can feel like a shot in the arm of a condensed mix of hope, actual good cheer and appreciation of people in all their difference. As Yaguchi does it here, avoiding the pitfalls of kitsch and bad faith storytelling looks easy – a quality of genuine humanity runs through scenes of broad and not so broad comedy, plain silliness and quiet contemplation, touching coming of age tropes without wagging a finger and teaching us all a valuable lesson.

The film does occasionally allow us to laugh at its characters, but it does so in a way that suggests we do so recognizing our own foibles in them; the film’s kindness is of a type that even allows us to be kind to our own failings.

Yaguchi’s main trick for avoiding the horrors of making this feel either treacly or unpleasant lies in this ability to look at his characters with kindness yet also show their failures and strengths and the connections and fissures in their relationships with great precision. There’s a lot of slapstick here, and a lot of very movie-like good cheer, but also a clear appreciation of emotional truths. It’s quite the thing, really, additionally delivered with perfect comedic timing.

Three Films Make A Post: She became the Ravaged Victim of a Century of Revenge!

Instant Numa (2009): Needs a lot of time to get going, but once it does, this comedy is often quite funny in a good-natured and very Japanese way, though the film's positivity/start-believin' mongering can become a bit annoying. With a running time of 120 minutes, the film is also way too long for its own good. Cut down to 90 or 100 minutes, I'd call it an excellent comedy, as it stands it's just good.

Survivors of director Satoshi Miki's earlier The Insects Unlisted In The Encyclopedia will probably be delighted to hear that there are only one and a half excretion-based jokes, one of 'em even kind of funny.

 

Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected (2005): This earlier movie by Satoshi about a terminally bored and lonely housewife who escapes her boredom by joining an absurdist spy ring that needs her to live as normal and boring as possible is shorter and more to the point than Instant Numa (and also only contains one excrement joke). A quietly charming Juri Ueno wins me over to a film whose quietly weird humour and good natured mocking of its characters (which seems to be Satoshi's thing outside of Insects) probably would not even have needed her help in that.

 

Searching For Haizmann (2003): A documentary film crew goes on the search for a centuries old painter who has after a pact with the devil become the Anti-Christ (who knew that adoption is enough in a case like this!), all the while torturing the helpless audience with bad acting of the type that fits the mockumentary format the least, the brightest lighting you'll ever find in a horror film, a painfully stupid and unimaginative script whose conception of evil is on the level of a Scooby Doo cartoon and the worst damn black mass I've ever had the bad luck to see in a movie, while a bunch of down-on-their-luck character actors (poor Tippi Hedren!) pretend to be experts on occultism in intercut interview bits.

On paper this is not even contemporary US independent horror at its worst, but I think the slight competence on display in aspects like editing, framing or audio make the film an even less pleasant experience than your typical rough backyard production is. Those films can at least surprise me (even if it is only through especially painful incompetence). Searching's only surprise is that it reminded my of the old Sonic Youth song "Satan is Boring".

I'd suggest that even my most hardened readers avoid this thing.

 

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