“Super Happy Forever”: In Japan, a love in reverse

THE WORLD'S OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED

An oceanic feeling presides over Super Happy Forever , the fourth feature film by Japanese director Kohei Igarashi, born in 1983, who discovered him with Takara. The Night I Swam (2017, co-directed with Damien Manivel). The sea frames the story that takes place in a small spa town on the Japanese coast (Atami, south of Tokyo): it is the sea that returns in the first and last shots, it borders the action, purrs in the interstices, it is also the one that is mentioned in the refrain that is hummed from time to time – Beyond the Sea , the international version of La Mer , by Charles Trenet. More than a simple background, the ocean offers itself as an image of time itself, in its calm power of engulfment. An image of oblivion for a film dug with holes and absences, worked by the twists and turns of a termite memory, haunted by the myth of eternal return.

Two Tokyo friends, Sano and Miyata (Hiroki Sano and Yoshinori Miyata in roles inspired by their own lives), wander like lost souls in this seaside resort, between the corridors of a faded chic hotel and the deserted city streets. The former, haggard, drags there the despair of having lost his wife, Nagi, who recently died in her sleep. He chases the memory of her and delusionally chases after a red cap that she supposedly misplaced there. The latter, who has come to lend him a hand, harps on about a miracle seminar he's attending, which has all the hallmarks of a cult (the "Super Happy Forever" who recognize each other by their rings). Between the bottomless darkness of one and the blissful optimism of the other, dissension looms.

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