ALL AROUND US (Japan, 2008)
Directed by: Ryosuke Hashiguchi
Starring: Lily Franky, Tae Kimura

You know Kanao and Shoko Sato.  You might think you don't, but you do.  He's a dreamer with a wandering eye, who's just left a dependable gig at a mall shoe repair shop to begin a dubious career as a courtroom sketch artist.  She's a type-A personality who works in publishing and constantly fends off the criticism of her fast-money brother and acerbic mother.  Their lovemaking follows a precise and mind-numbingly rote schedule, emblazoned with a Hawksian Scarface-style 'X" on the month's calendar ("Wear some lipstick," Kanao pleads as Shoko attempts to herd him into the boudoir for routine servicing).  They are college sweethearts. 

Kanao and Shoko are young, in love, and pregnant, and all around them, for the eight years in their marriage between 1993 and 2001, time marches on without fanfare as Shoko loses her baby and sinks into depression, growing more and more distant from the taciturn Kanao, while the economic bubble bursts and Japan slowly goes mad - salarymen embezzle millions, otaku dismember little girls and eat their fingers raw with soy sauce, religious cultists unleash poison gas on the subway, and Kanao's sketchpad captures it all with unerring detail.  But somewhere between the second or third child-killer and Shoko pinning her fading good fortune on the unexpected presence of a house spider, the Satos find each other again, and life jump-starts with Akeboshi's infectious musical score and a kaleidoscope of watercolor flowers.  "Living's a skill, like painting," the Buddhist monk next door counsels a liberated Shoko, while a repentant cultist tells the court that he didn't desire "absolute happiness" in his life, but rather "ordinary happiness."  It's a start, anyway.

But these are not simply ORDINARY PEOPLE playing out SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE; where Bergman's war-torn marrieds couldn't put aside their bloodsport and wordplay, director Hashiguchi refrains from staging confrontations and crafting setpieces.  Instead, he gives us Kanao and Shoko facing life, and each other, on a 'come as you are' basis, sometimes repelling from one another but occasionally, profoundly intersecting, not with a swell on the soundtrack but with a curved lip or the blink of an eye.  Emotional milestones are rendered in stark shorthand; spilled rice, a memorial marker, but life, tragedies and all, is not without its wry humor.  Ryosuke Hashiguchi is a celebrated director of the so-called "New Japanese cinema;" an out gay filmmaker known for such arthouse darlings as HUSH.  After six years away, he returns with ALL AROUND US, his first film dealing with a straight couple, and his focus is as laser-like (yet deceptively languid) as ever.

As Shoko and Kanao, respectively, Tae Kimura and author-turned-actor Lily Franky are achingly real.  In his first acting role, Franky is a revelation, doing more with a sleepy glance than Tom Cruise has done with an arsenal of tics.  Over the years, Kanao transforms before our eyes from a lazy slacker-womanizer to a stalwart but internalized husband struggling to navigate the unfamiliar emotional landscape of his own home.  The artistry of Franky's performance is that we are never quite sure how much of Kanao has changed, or how much of him has always been there, waiting to be found through the crude archaeology of human interaction.  By contrast, Tae Kimura's metamorphosis as Shoko is more overt but just as glorious; when she comes back to life, activating a whole new component of herself, the picture does the same, and we accompany Shoko as she bursts forth as though from a chrysalis. 

Are Kanao and Shoko surrogates for the Japanese psyche in a slim window of time?  Is "ordinary happiness," love for its own sake, enough?  Hashiguchi offers no easy answers about these people, nor any pat moral judgments about the criminals Kanao watches from the gallery.  Life is simply happening here.  It's worth something.