HANA & ALICE (Japan, 2004)
Directed by: Shunji Iwai
Starring: Anne Suzuki (Hana), Yu Aoi (Alice)

Forget about Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou. Forget about Chen Kaige and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Asia’s best director is Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou Chou). The problem is that Iwaii’s films are concerned with three things that most film critics refuse to take seriously: adolescence, women, and love. Dismissed as “trendy” and “pop” by humorless film critics, Iwai is one of Japan’s best-loved directors. His fans are legion, and they’re rabid in their devotion. By bringing over his latest movie, we hope to shine some light on a director who has been neglected in America for far too long.

The movie turns that basic staple of high school films — the story of two best friends who grow apart — into a Homeric epic.  Hana (Anne Suzuki) and Alice (Yu Aoi) are best friends and we all know how it’s going to go: Hana is the weird funny one, and Alice is the popular good-looking one. When they see two cute boys on the train one morning Alice decides that Hana can “have” the younger one, Mark, because she’s got her eye on his older friend. Jumping forward almost a year, neither girl has made much progress with her romantic pursuits until one day, when Hana is following Mark, he passes out. When he wakes up she’s standing over him declaring that she’s his girlfriend and that he has amnesia and doesn’t remember their passionate relationship. They’re through the rabbit hole, and the movie turns into a comedy of intense embarrassment as Hana makes herself the bane of Mark’s existence, wielding their imaginary relationship like a whip to keep him in line.

Iwai regards high school as a battlefield: innocent kids go in one end, face extreme challenges and struggles, and come out the other end, battle hardened and ready for adulthood. Hana & Alice gives us all that, but it also challenges our lazy expectations. Slowly we find out that Hana isn’t as weird, and that Alice isn’t as normal, as we originally thought. Taking every triumph and tragedy seriously, and refusing to undercut the close-to-the-surface emotions of his hormonal leads with cheap irony, Iwai makes a movie that’s a clear-eyed, moving, romantic, and unsentimental ode to growing up.

Funny and heart-breaking, this flick is for anyone who ever had a friend.