A gleaming sports car, some high-school high jinks and a rigid principal all figure into the writer-director Neo Sora’s “Happyend,” set in near-future Tokyo. Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.
We meet the film’s central characters, Yuta, Kou, Ming, Tomu and Ata-chan, as the seniors try entering a club for a techno set (featuring the D.J. Yousuke Yukimatsu). The multiethnic crew push Ming because she speaks Chinese. Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), who is Japanese, and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), who is Zainichi Korean, are able to slip through. And in the strobes and throb of the club, their affection but also the barest hint of their differences shimmer.
The group of friends gives off an outsider vibe (especially against the backdrop of racial nationalism in the country). While they make their way toward graduation, the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake looms.
On TV, the prime minister exploits the possibility of disaster to enact security crackdowns. For his part, the school principal (Shiro Sano) installs a surveillance system after being pranked by students. During this time, fissures develop in Yuta and Kou’s friendship, and Yuta’s ease wears thin. Kou is drawn into the political activism of his classmate Fumi (Kilala Inori).
Sora, his cinematographer, Bill Kirstein, and the composer Lia Ouyang Rusli capture the achy pleasures of youthful friendship and the tectonic frictions of the personal, the political and the geological. When a pen rolls on a desk, we’re right to wonder, is it an anxious kid tapping his foot or the Big One?
Happyend
Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.
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