Last Thursday was a great night, because old friend Brittany Rapone, who last presented almost exactly seven years ago (but who has managed to drop in from time to time) was back to visit us in a space lying somewhere between Oxford and Japan. Brittany is one of the few who has kept us up to speed on anime – and in fact the one that she presented on this evening was younger (2017) than her last presentation (2015). The film she chose was entitled The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, and was directed by Masaaki Yuasa.
The film ostensibly takes place on a single evening and effectively follows the exploits of an unnamed female university student (I wanted to say that her name didn’t matter, but it turns out that she was only ever referred to as “Junior”.)
A little Welsh claret
The primary thing that we learn about the young lady is that she can drink.
Sangria
Like a lot.
Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster
Like really a lot.
So the first half hour or so of her exploits involves mostly crashing various parties and drinking. I should have counted. She probably had about 59 drinks.
None comment
Which naturally leads to things like this Philosopher’s Dance, which is not very ladylike, but in a cartoon no one can see your panties unless the artist wants them to. Before her binge is over, Junior somehow ends up in a drinking contest with a supernatural being and…wins. OK.
Yes, this handsome devil is single, ladies!
Of course, that’s not the whole story, and from the beginning (in fact, from apparently several months ago at least) Junior has been pursued by the also-nameless Senior, who is desperately in love with her and continues to deliberately run into her, not only on the evening of the film but relentlessly prior (we are to understand). She keeps saying that it’s coincidence, but he insists that it is chance. Or, maybe she says that it is chance but he insists that it is coincidence. The difference matters very, very much to Senior, but matters so little to me and to the film that I can’t even remember which English word was used for which. I can only hope that in Japanese there is a significant semantic distinction that is just difficult-to-impossible to render into English, because otherwise it does seem like a pretty random point of contention from Senior.
And so Joseph scorn’d the bed of Potiphar’s wife, and lo, she was wroth and did say unto her husband, “See your servant who this day did come unto me to take me by force!”
Anyway, throughout the course of the night our two lead characters run across several strange plot lines, including some random J. Edgar Hoover at the head of a secret university detective police spy agency kind of thing. No, it doesn’t make any sense. Somehow J. Edgar knows that Senior is after Junior (because, hey, if you’re the head of the secret university detective police spy agency it is your damn business to know who is amorously chasing after whom – and to have hidden cameras ready to film them). And somehow he manages to enlist Senior to instead apprehend…Don Underwear!
You can cut the crusts off, it’s OK!
Don Underwear is a dude who looks like he belongs on the plastic wrapper to some cheap-ass enriched white bread. And that may be where he came from, but ever since he fell in love a year ago with a girl with whom he was caught in a simultaneous apple spill, he has pledged to never change his underwear until he finds her again and wins her love. And so he runs a nightly guerilla theater vaguely based on The Count Of Monte Cristo (hmm! a sandwich!) in an attempt to somehow find her. It makes sense?
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turns out that the girl that Don’t Don Underwear fell in love with was really J. Edgar Hoover in drag (now this makes sense), which is kind of a drag until some other bizarre simultaneous accident causes Panty-Boy to transfer his love to a guerilla theater co-star who has had her eye on him for a while. So I guess they live happily ever after, or at the very least, he changes his name to Don Commando or something.
Well, she said she’d stick around until the bandages came off/But these mama boys just don’t know when to quit/The Junior asks the Senior are those dreams or are those prayers/Just close your eyes son and this won’t hurt a bit
Somehow in the midst of all this stuff Senior has learned (from J. Edgar?? I don’t know, and I don’t care) that the key to Junior’s heart is a picture book from her childhood, and not just any copy of the book, but the copy that she used to have with her name in it. So he sets about – again, in the midst of this bizarre evening – to peruse some sort of massive midnight underground book collector’s faire to find it. Massive midnight underground book collector faires are also things in Japan. And in the end, he has to go through an impromptu spicy-food eating contest overseen by the supernatural being that Junior has previously (one typo away from preciously, but that too) defeated in a drinking contest. The supernatural apparently recover quickly. No AAS here. But Senior winning the contest wins the book (it wasn’t a contest for the book per se, more so a contest for one’s heart’s desire).
And Senior wants to find Junior and gift her the book but he gets sick with a cold. There’s a cold going around. It goes around really fast, and by the end of the night, the vast majority of characters in the film (with the exception of the hyper-immune Junior) are laid up in bed with it. This thing comes on harder than Ebola. But there goes Junior ministering door-to-door to her various invalids until she finally comes upon Senior’s place. And things lead to things and they end up arranging to go on a date. The End.
I suppose I can’t quite disguise that I didn’t like this film. It did not speak to me. From the beginning of the film it’s obvious that it falls into the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-builds-new-girl genre (is that right?) so there’s no real question about what is going to happen more or less. As such it’s the film’s job perhaps not to surprise you, but at least to get you invested in the characters and the story.
For me, getting invested was a grade A fail.
The story itself can’t be taken seriously – the sheer volume of stuff packed into one night is ridiculous. The drinking, and the drinking, and the drinking,
…
…
…
… and the drinking. And the not being drunk. The insta-cold. (Pre-COVID! It’s not a metaphor!) The supernatural dude and the underwear dude and the J. Edgar dude and the childhood book and some plot lines about a pervert and who remembers what else that I skipped mentioning…it’s just all so schizoid and random. It seems that it needs to be metaphorical, rather than an account of a real evening, but there’s just nothing about the film that suggests metaphor at all.
Plot lines are opened only to be immediately resolved before they can even begin to establish themselves. One feels like (this, of course, always means “I feel like”) the director faced the challenge of adapting a book for screen by making sure to include every little item for the fanboys without bothering to think how the uninitiated would see the film. Having not read the book, I can’t know this for certain, but that’s the feel, and it ends up seeming a lot more like a full season of an episodic TV show edited down to an hour and a half than a film. I can only hope that the book supplies the dreadfully-needed metaphorical context better than the film, because if not, why was this movie even made?
And yes, it appears from the internet commentary that I’m in the minority on this opinion. Fine. So be it. But whatever it is that you get out of this movie, I don’t get it.
Sorry, Brittany! Great to see you anyway!
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 