“Something big is about to change,” is surely one ominous beginning for a debut fiction feature, but director Neo Sora knows how to calibrate the fine balance between anticipation and inevitability. A story set in the near future, Happyend makes Tokyo a vast playground to high-school seniors gathered around childhood pals Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka). Life is blooming and the future is ripe for those teenagers, even if the whole city is constantly preparing itself for a catastrophic earthquake. Daily drills and false alarms interrupt an otherwise-smooth rhythm where Yuta and Kou gather their classmates at their Music Research Club, an extracurricular that’s more enjoyable than practical in purpose. With a fully equipped school room at their disposal at all times, the gang can build a secure microcosm for the shared love of electronic avant-garde and a generally good time.
But Happyend is far from a one-note film: its propulsion and vivacity comes from the ensemble cast of capable youngsters and is further amplified by a phenomenal score from Brooklyn-based composer Lia Ouyang Rusli. Music plays a big role here, and anyone who’s seen the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus––which premiered on the Lido only last year––conceived around the last concert of Sora’s late father, won’t be surprised to find riches of embodied feelings in how Happyend sounds, too. The 33-year-old’s second feature also world-premiered at Venice, in the Horizons section, and is already set to grace the screens of Toronto, Busan, and the New York Film Festival––expect to be hearing about this one for a while.
Sora paints this near-future Tokyo with the true colors of today’s socio-political anxieties––nationalism, xenophobia, surveillance, compliance––and the characters of Happyend encounter more of those discriminatory attacks every day, not least in their school. After pulling an innocent (but very inventive) stunt on the principal, they and everyone else have to conform to the new normal reigned in by a sophisticated surveillance system with the cutesy name “Panopty.” Just as the school authorities utilize that incident to strengthen the grip of control, on a larger scale, the government uses the looming earthquake threat to pass an emergency decree to interfere into people’s private lives. Call it Foucauldian, or “the state of exception” as per Giorgio Agamben––and no wonder; Sora is a Philosophy graduate as well––but what’s impressive about the biopolitical underpinnings of Happyend is that never overtake the beautiful humanistic devotion that saturates every frame.
Cinematographer Bill Kirstein (who, as well as Opus, also shot Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s gorgeous So Pretty) sculpts symphonies out of crisp, deep-staged images. The visuals seem pristine because of their inner geometry, yet they are anything but flat; Kirstein’s long shots are unlike any other, as if the emotional richness weaves itself around the frame’s angular (straight) compositions slowly and subtly, like ivy. A rather sensual vision of a sterile future to come, Happyend does not compromise its political bite in service of form; the more comfortable we get by observing this world, the more radical it becomes.
Yuta and Kou soon split their ways, metaphorically at least: the latter becomes more politically outspoken while the former dwells in his apolitical bubble. Through them, the film questions the role of rebellion and one’s relations to rules––abiding or breaking them––where control reaches tremendous heights in the service of security. “The children, they have to feel safe!” is a leitmotif here, but nobody asks the children whether they need to be saved. In this way, Sora’s script also engages with the conflicting attitudes older generations approach younger ones with, a mix of condescension and worry. Similarly, Happyend outlines two kinds of responses to a future that seems bleaker by the hour: one is abdication, the other resistance. But the split between the two is never clear-cut and Neo Sora imbues the film with doubts, hesitation, and hope in equal measure.
Happyend premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be released by Metrograph Pictures.