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‘Happyend’ Review: Friendship Isn’t Future-Proof in a Poignant Surveillance-State Allegory
A teenage friendship begins to crack under the strain of high-school authoritarianism in Neo Sora's impressive, restrained, moving debut "Happyend."
In tomorrow’s Tokyo, where the concrete curves and high-rise skylines have a slightly denatured air (perhaps because the film was largely shot in Kobe) a high-school principal (Shiro Sano) is distressed to discover his beloved sports car has overnight been set on its rear bumper, and now stands like a splashy yellow monolith in middle of the gray school courtyard. Students gape at it in wonder — slap Banksy’s name on it and you could call it art — but this juvenile prank, revealed to us in one of DP Bill Kerstein’s graceful, self-possessed tracking shots, is swiftly declared an act of “terrorism” and becomes the pretext for the installation of a draconian surveillance system. That’s a project that doesn’t much interest privileged rebel-without-a-cause Yuta as, under the ebbs and swells of Lia Ouyang Rusli’s superb score — monumental electro one moment, softest piano the next, never overbearingly deployed — Sora gradually narrows the focus of his own all-seeing-eye onto the bond between him and the more thoughtful Kou.
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