Strawberry Shortcakes

              
Director: Yazaki Hitoshi
Year: 2006
Rating: 6.5
Loneliness and emptiness with a slight tailwind of hope waft through this film like an effortless breeze. It depicts the lives of four single Japanese women in their 20's living in Tokyo whose love lives and work lives have come to a standstill and they seem unable to change that. It begins to weigh you down as the viewer because these are not bad people - in fact one's affection for them grows as the film snatches little pieces and details of their lives and puts them together. The film does it slowly and sporadically as it jumps from character to character but rarely stays for more than a few minutes. It is based on a manga from female writer Kiriko Nananan, who also wrote Blue that was adapted for film. It is directed by a man though, Hitoshi Yazaki, and I wonder if a female director would have brought a different approach to this film. There is a fair amount of nudity and sex which I wonder if a female would have done - or perhaps that is right from the manga. And the writer was right there. It just felt a tiny bit exploitive to me.




The women are very different from one another and they never really all connect in a tangible manner. We first meet Satoko (Chizuru Ikewaki - Josee, the Tiger and the Fish, Shoplifters) as the film opens and she is narrating to the audience "I was dragged by a man" and the camera pulls back to realize that she is actually hanging on to a man's leg who has just broken up with her as she is pulled down the street. After he kicks her loose, she says "I wanna fall in love". She is a receptionist at the Heaven's Gate escort agency. And all she really wants is to fall in love with a special man who thinks she is special.



Working there also but as an escort girl is Akiyo (Yūko Nakamura) who wants to earn enough money to buy a condo above the fifth floor - so that when you decide to kill yourself, you are high enough. She sleeps in a coffin which also comes in handy as a kitchen table to eat off. Her encounters with men "I am Akiyo. Am I to your liking" are pretty awful.



Chihiro (Noriko Nakagoshi) is a tea girl in an office - very pretty and very much needs a man in her life. Her life is a romantic novel of falling in love and being dumped. She rooms with Toko (played by none other than Kiriko Nananan, the writer of the manga). Toko is a tough character to quite understand - an artist obsessed with her art - a bulimic who throws up when Chihiro is not around and when Chihiro is at works she reads Chihiro's diary and masturbates. It wasn't really clear to me if she was in love with Chihiro or just obsessed by a girl who seemed so simple and single-minded.



In one sense their lives are fairly ordinary - even for Akiyo who when not working dresses down in a t-shirt and jeans and tries to win the heart of a man she knew at university. A part of me kept expecting one of them to commit suicide but as a spoiler no one does. The end doesn't really bring closure or happiness - but has a satisfying feel to it. Life continues. Don't give up.