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It’s impossible to underestimate the aspirational power of movies. The popularity of Hollywood cinema during the Depression was due to its ability to remove people from the anxiousness of their everyday lives for a few hours, usually by presenting characters in well-off situations. As Preston Sturges demonstrated so fundamentally in Sullivan’s Travels, what people want when they’re down-and-out is something that makes them laugh, and while cinema is capable of so much more it’s this idea of being transported that undergirds all films. Musicals are perhaps the purest form of this idea, since they are by definition fantasies that privilege the characters’ emotional lives. Nick Winston has adapted and directed a film version of Laurence Mark White’s stage musical about a couple getting a divorce, and while the situation depicted has its moments of insight and dramatic clarity, it’s set in a world that feels managed to provoke feelings that clash with what’s emotionally going on in the story.

The movie starts at the end, with the divorce of Jack (Ramin Karimloo) and Catherine (Samantha Banks) an almost done deal, and juxtaposes their sad and bitter interactions with those at the beginning of their relationship, when they were falling in love. Both have creative vocations—Jack is a failed novelist working for big bucks in advertising and Catherine is a successful painter—and live in a hip, sterile penthouse that only a tech baron could afford. The purpose of this annoyingly intrusive production design is to show how material matters have made the couple’s marriage untenable, which is an acceptable reason for divorce, but makes for weak broth with which to cook up a musical. White’s muscular pop songs seem written for an entirely different sort of story, one where people overcome adversity, but all the characters seem stuck in a limbo of romantic indifference. One reason may be that the original story was written for American characters and an American setting, but, due to the way the project developed, ended up anchoring a British production with West End actors. There’s a generic quality to the performances and the direction (not to mention the urban milieu, which is London but evokes nothing distinctive about the city) that make the whole movie feel perfunctory and featureless. In the end, what you mainly come away with is: These people seem to have a lot of money. What are they bitching about?

Now playing in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Tomorrow Morning home page in Japanese

photo (c) Tomorrow Morning UK Ltd. and Visualize Films Ltd. Exclusively licensed to TAMT Co. Ltd. for Japan 

This seems to be the season in Japan for delayed releases of American comedies set in Texas and centered on female characters. Though I think Support the Girls, which came out here two months ago, is a better movie, Never Goin’ Back is perhaps more distinctive simply because it was directed by a woman, Augustine Frizzell, meaning its take on the protagonists is more naturally funny without sacrificing the emotional investment. Unlike in Support the Girls, the girls here are really girls in that BFFs Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Camila Morrone) should be in high school but they’ve already dropped out and are working full time as waitresses while also sharing a house. They live more or less paycheck to paycheck, but their preternatural free-spiritedness means they also live exactly the way they want—it’s why they dropped out, and the film doesn’t judge them for it at all. 

The plot is very simple, and Frizzell uses it as a kind of frame with which to elaborate the socioeconomic circumstances that rule Angela and Jessie’s life. Jessie’s 17th birthday is coming up and Angela wants to treat her to a holiday on the beautiful beaches of Galveston. Since they live in Fort Worth, that wouldn’t seem to be a big deal, but they’re living on minimum wage, so it is a big deal, and the storyline involves their various machinations to make the trip a reality, which turns out to be more difficult than Angela imagined. For one thing, Angela has already blown their combined savings on transportation and reservations, leaving them without enough money to pay the rent that month. Though they seem confident they can scrounge the cash from their roommates, those roommates, being male and barely of drinking age, are patently unreliable. One of them is Jessie’s brother, Dustin (Joel Allen), a would-be weed kingpin who in the opening scene is robbed by some competitors. The other is Brandon (Kyle Mooney), a fairly gentle but addle-brained horndog who is an easy touch. 

Dustin’s sudden insolvency makes the household’s rent emergency that much more acute, and the rest of the movie, which finds not only Dustin’s hapless crew being threatened endlessly, but the girls getting fired and then thrown in jail, is what used to be referred to as a “madcap romp,” though one that is qualified by the aforementioned socioeconomic circumstances, not to mention the kind of loose, profane comic style that has dominated these kinds of youth movies since Superbad. A lot of this sort of thing is stretched uncomfortably thin—the humor derived from white dudes trading in Black-identified vernacular gets old fast, and while Frizzell sends up her redneck milieu with care and smarts, the various schemes concocted to deal with the crises at hand seem over-determined and often detract from the casual likability of the various characters, including Angela and Jessie. Frizzell could have just made a great comedy about their affecting friendship without all the narrative huffing and puffing, but, then, who would go see it? 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

Never Goin’ Back home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2018 Muffed Up LLC

Robert Coe and Warwick Ross’s subtly effective documentary about four Zimbabwe emigrants to South Africa walks a careful line in explicating the men’s difficulities in adjusting to new lives in a place fraught with risks for outsiders—doubly so in a country like South Africa, which retains many elements of its racist heritage while also throwing up economic obstacles for newcomers in general. The two filmmakers present the economic crisis in Zimbabwe as more than just an impetus to seek better circumstances. Moving was a life-and-death decision for these four men, some of whom had to leave behind family to make a truly treacherous journey to a place where they were not welcome but which then knew needed laborers.

But after these matters are neatly presented, the movie becomes almost carefree in its depiction of the men’s lives as they slowly settle in and adjust (thanks in no small part to the churches they join), and that brings us to what these four men have in common. All ended up in the service industy, specifically high-end restaurants where they had to learn from scratch how to please well-off customers, initially as waiters. As the title suggests, they made the most of whatever opportunities arrived, even if they involved understanding something totally outside their lived experience, and that’s how they all became sommeliers. As one tells the camera, when he first tasted wine he was grossed out. “I didn’t like it,” he says, “I was sick for two days.” But when he realized how important wine was to the customers he served, and how they depended on their waiter to recommend something good to go with their meals, he learned as much as he could, as did the other three subjects of the film. They studied and became good at their jobs, so much so that they eventually banded together to represent South Africa—a major wine-producing country, by the way—at the World Wine Tasting Championship in France. That South Africa would be represented not only by four Black men, but four Black migrants, did not escape the purview of the world of wine-tasting, and eventually their efforts were recognized by experienced coaches who offered to help them attain their dream of traveling to Europe to compete. Understanding what their profile at the contest can do for Africa’s image, they dub themselves Team Zimbabwe, thus representing not just a continent, but a phenomenon. 

If the movie loses some of its dramatic mojo in the second half, it’s mainly because Coe and Ross have no choice but to sit back and allow matters to run their course. The team adjusts with comic determination to the whims of their eccentric white coaches, struggles to generate funding, meets with the usual culture clash issues in France, and generally have a good time (without getting drunk, since none of the four like alcohol for that reason). Occasionally, one or more members wax philosophical about the meaning of wine, which to them is impressive because each bottle is a link to a specific piece of land at a specific point in time (the contest essentially boils down to blind-tasting wines and determining where they are from and what vintage), thus, in a way, mirroring their own situations. The movie doesn’t even have to try to be stirring and heartwarming.

In English, French and Shona. Opens Dec. 16 in Tokyo at Huma Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinemart (03-3352-5645).

Blind Ambition home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Third Man Films Pty Ltd.