Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi

. . . but bad things happen nonetheless. It started off so slowly and (I confess) dully: tree canopies, then more tree canopies. But not beautifully shot, as the tree canopies in Perfect Days. A man -Takumi – chopping wood in the snow, expertly splitting the logs with a single blow of the axe. Men collecting water from a spring and taking the cans to their cars, stopping briefly to collect some wild wasabi. A public meeting about the construction of a glamping site and discussion about the siting of a septic tank. Banal talk in the car about jobs and dating apps. And yet . . .

It became mesmerising and thought-provoking. A small community in a forest where spring water is their drinking water and the forest provides their fuel. It’s not primitive: their cars are four-wheel drives. The public meeting was crucial to the unfolding of the film, with Takumi pointing out the importance of balancing the environment with human activity. The glamping site, as proposed, would pollute the drinking water and the inevitable campfires would pose a danger to the forest. I thought afterwards that the way scenes were framed embodied this balance; at first I had thought them dreadfully mundane, but actually there was a balance – for example, between the trees, the snow, the house and the 4WD. The same with the long, banal shots through the back of the car window: the tarmac road receding, but balanced on either side by the forest and at the top by the snow-covered mountains. Characters were often seen moving behind thick trunks or obscured by high banking – a small blob in the wider environment. The short interlude in Tokyo was completely the opposite: the occasional verticals of intermittent tree trunks were replaced by the domineering verticals of nothing but office blocks.

Nobody actually wanted to “be evil”. The Tokyo company representatives didn’t want to upset the delicate balance of the forest and human activity. Takahashi didn’t intend to startle the deer that (presumably) attacked Takumi’s daughter. Takumi didn’t mean to forget to collect his daughter nor to hurt Takahasi. The deer didn’t want to attack. And the glamping site was a means of accessing time-limited subsidies rather than ruining a community’s drinking water, so it just “had to” go ahead for the sake of the company and employee’s salaries. (Hmph.)

Shades of Italian neo-realism; I read afterwards that the actors were not professionals. That would account for the expert log-splitting.