Happyend review - the kids are never alright

Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room.

Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.

 

And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car henge” exhibit. It’s not clear quite how they do this as it happens off-screen, like a few other social upheavals in this fable of creeping crackdowns in the land of the rising sun. But it leads to sanctions on the whole school that the kids must chafe at for the length of the movie.

 

It’s a first fiction feature by Neo Dora and is set in a “near future” when certain elements of regimented Japanese society are getting out of hand. Speakers everywhere keep everyone on tenterhooks for earthquakes and a posting about an “emergency decree” is bat-signalled into the sky, aimed against agitators. A tangle of Tokyo concrete and steel hems us in (though the picture was largely shot in Kobe).

 

Worst of all for our teens, the school’s super-grinch headteacher (Shirô Sano) hires a firm called Panopty to install facial recognition cameras, loaded with AI that spots each minor infringement and fines pupils with punishment points exposed on giant screens. The company name seems a nod to the old idea of a “panopticon” to watch prisoners in Georgian England – and seized on by post-modernist thinker Michel Foucault as a symbol for the all-snooping, disciplinary society of today.

 

Yuta and Kou are two likely lads driven apart by the mounting social stresses. Yuta wants to bury himself in DJ-ing, and gets a part-time job at a turntable shop. In a rare comic moment, his middle-aged boss turns out to be a dab deck-hand herself at spinning techno (while another of the film’s small gags is the way no one copes with stuff written on paper any more). 

 

Kou, meanwhile, is drawn towards street protests and a sit-in by a radical girl classmate called Fumi (Kilala Inori). The clampdowns by the authorities seem a lot milder than real-life ones in, say, Hong Kong, and the movie even seems a bit behind the times in terms of today’s mounting despotism in the West.

 

Race, though, is a notable pressure point on Kou, who is a “Zainichi” Korean of questionable citizenship, a group targeted by the film’s prime minister who rails against “illegal foreigners”. Two of Kou’s other mates might come into this category – a Chinese girl and a Black kid with folks in the US. They have to leave the room when a “self-defence force” soldier gives a talk in class.

 

Yuta and Kou face a reckoning when the school principal says he’ll drop all the surveillance if the culprits who turned his motor into a domino come forward. Neo Sora has directed everything to this point in a stately, somewhat oblique style, minus sex and violence, and only side-glancing at the street demos we hear about. He’s the son of the famed composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who starred in and did the score for Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), a harsher and bolder look at Japanese oppression of old.

 

The future-facing Happyend is more minimalist, not to say miniaturist. It has more in common with the long tradition of hyper-courteous Japanese films – stiff filmic forms critiquing stiff social norms, where emotions roil beneath politely enamelled surfaces, from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) and Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) to the masterworks today of Hirokazu Kore-eda and the Oscar-winning, Murakami-based Drive My Car (2021). 

 

Yet the kind of suppressed simmerings seen in those canny classics face a struggle, in this precision-tooled offering, to emerge – and hence engage and move us quite as fully as they might. It’s a blackboard jungle that’s a little too manicured.