Like the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day, as an actor Lily Franky tends to work best when he happens to inhabit a character whose attitude aligns with his hangdog appearance. He’s not much on interpretation, and so there has to be a Franky-ness in the role’s construction for him to succeed in it. In his debut feature, British director Patrick Dickinson, who studied Japanese film at Oxford and Waseda, was wise to solicit Franky’s services for his protagonist, Kenzaburo Oshima, a Tokyo writer who is quietly devastated by the untimely death of his wife, Akiko (Tae Kimura). Kenzaburo is the kind of husband and father who prefers to keep misfortune and bad feelings at arm’s length by not acknowledging them fully, and thus comes across as insufficiently caring. When Akiko tells him that she has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, he waves it away, saying that things will be OK, and, of course, they aren’t, and by the time things turn really bad he is unprepared for his responsibilities, not only in caring for Akiko, but also in being there for his adult son, Toshi (Ryo Nishikido). It’s obvious that Toshi and Akiko have a much closer relationship than the ones that Kenzaburo has with either, and all he can do is look on and wallow in self-pity.

It’s a potent enough theme to carry a film, and Franky does most of the heavy lifting without breaking a sweat, but Dickinson undermines the drama by framing it as a road movie of redemption. Akiko once visited England’s Lake District with her parents when she was a young child and enamored of the writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter, who is from the area. In a will she wrote before she lost all cognitive function, she asks Kenzaburo to scatter her ashes at Lake Windermere, and the movie charts Kenzaburo’s tragicomically Sisyphean struggle to overcome his self-regard in order to carry out her last wish. Toshi, his wife Satsuki (Rin Takanashi), and their 4-year-old daughter accompany Kenzaburo to the UK, where his habit of closing himself off and getting drunk when faced with unpleasantness has an even more deleterious effect on their relationship. In a fit, Toshi practically disowns his father, and Kenzaburo lights out on his own with Akiko’s ashes to find the spot she memorialized in a single old photograph. Naturally, the endeavor is confounded by predictable language barriers and general ineptitude (he takes the wrong train). Thanks to a chance encounter with a local family (Ciaran Hinds, Aoife Hinds) that has also suffered a recent loss, he manages to get to where he wants to go.

If the climax doesn’t hit with as much force as it’s meant to, it’s because the framing story gets in the way. Dickinson never establishes an emotional connection between Akiko and Potter/Peter Rabbit. They’re presented as well-known images associated with Akiko’s childhood, but they were beloved by children the world over, and we never learn what it was about those books that appealed to Akiko in particular. Moreover, Kenzaburo, who is himself a writer (of what, exactly, isn’t revealed), appears to have no interest in Potter or her work beyond the task at hand. Dickinson demonstrates a genuine passion for the scenery that probably enchanted Akiko as a little girl, but the viewer has to draw their own conclusions to that end because he doesn’t want to intrude on the inner lives of his characters. In a tale about one man’s reckoning with lost opportunities, only Franky makes us feel anything. 

In Japanese and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

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