Amidst the handful of world premieres in the Gala Selection of Tokyo International Film Festival, the sophomore film by Yusuke Morii (his first was “Amiko”) stands out for how it confidently strides along a line of whimsy and rather dark reflections on the desperate lengths its characters go to in order to soothe their loneliness. That film is “Route29,” named for the road taken by its main subjects, the 30-something janitor named Noriko and Haru, the pre-teen tomboy she’s traveling with. While working with her cleaning company at a hospital, on a smoke break Noriko meets a distressed young mother who says that she’s going to die soon, and begs Noriko to help her see her child one last time.
Loosely inspired by the poetry book “Route 29 Liberations” by Taichi Nakao, the film is gently divided into a series of vignettes along the eponymous road connecting the cities of Himeji and Tottori. Noriko steals her company van to drive from Tottori to Himeji, where she finds Haru in a forest, hanging out with a hermit only referred to as Master Shake. One truck stop and some misplaced trust later, Noriko (nicknamed “Dragonfly” by Haru) find themselves having to walk the rest of the way back to Tottori, and their encounters with strangers on the road maintain a winsome level of surreality.
The growing fondness between Noriko and Haru and their opening up to each other is expected for films such as this, so what keeps “Route29” feeling fresh is just how much it holds back from the audience combined with injections of surreality — dreamlike images of fish swimming on land, wedding parties gathered in canoes on the lake, the list goes on. Those encounters on the road (and in the water) are simply left up to the audience to decipher.
An overturned car with an old man found sitting inside, a lady in red with two incredibly old golden retrievers, a father and son who live as survivalists in the forest. Some are hard to read, while others take these random meetings as a chance to unburden themselves of every thought that has accumulated in their isolation — the father and son pairing in particular illustrating the film’s interest in a general weariness towards how stifling city living can be, the older man’s seemingly misanthropic point of view coming from bitterness towards the constant capitalist grind (“I feel like I’m getting more and more isolated. Doesn’t that bother you? Being forgotten about by everyone?”, he laments.)
Director Morii, according to the festival’s notes, spent a month traveling along the route himself, and that familiarity with the area’s idiosyncrasies and winding paths comes across loud and clear.
Each stop gradually peels back some slight emotional layers of its somewhat inscrutable main pairing. Haru is a charming bundle of energy, while Noriko is quiet, shaggy-haired and awkward — actress Haruka Ayase working with a lot of restraint but still getting to play with some physical comedy, fumbling through lighting a cigarette and sparking it backwards as she tries to find her ward.
Morii keeps the underlying emotion as to why Noriko said yes to this unspoken — though it seems evident enough that there’s something missing for her, and perhaps acting benevolently would help her. The joy of “Route29” is seeing how Morii frames this discomfort, often from a rather clinical distance, director of photography Yukiko Iioka’s incredibly neat and boxy shot composition favoring an angular, awkward portraiture; a lot of the film is observed in long shots that highlight stiff body language, while early conversations between the two main characters are broken down into rhythmic shot-reverse shots with them looking directly to camera in each response. There’s lovely interplay with its costuming, the bright tones of each character standing out amidst the overwhelming greenery of the forest, or the vivid red of the “Lady in Red With Dogs”’s very upscale looking coat and hat.
Those organized, orderly shot compositions and Hayano Ryo’s finely tuned editing rhythms contrast with both the rather romantic score from Bialystocks (who also write the end credits ear-worm, “Mirror”) but also the film’s rather unruly sense of humor — whether that’s smaller and more disarming like Haru suddenly yelling “fuck!” in English after finding out how long the drive is going to be, or a more elaborate early sequence where Noriko’s coworkers discover that she’s stolen their ride home, quick cuts showing them retracing Noriko’s steps back to their van, only to have a hard cut to the parking space being empty.
The film’s general sense of distance carries into the writing, as Morii leaves just the right amount unexplained (almost every character besides about three or four are left unnamed, described only by appearance in the credits) — Noriko’s backstory is teased out in increments before the dam breaks in the film’s final stretch as she encounters a relative, whose initial joy at seeing them quickly curdles into rage at them having left in the first place.
“Route29”’s almost bright and confectionary costume design (courtesy of Haruki Koketsu), often bumps up against a frequently dark sense of humor and its clipped dialogue, often cold in its tone. It stops shy of feeling twee because of its slightly mean streak — not all of the people they meet on the road have good intentions, and Morii happily plays with those expectations. This isn’t to say that the film enjoys being cruel — every now and then an act of genuine charity appears as some understated relief, perhaps inspired in the characters all sharing a similar exhaustion at urban living, taking comfort in finding other people who have drifted out of the city. Morii coalesces all of these quirks and strange encounters into a striking and very memorable film that doesn’t just settle for being “life-affirming”.
