When Otomo Katsuhiro saw his manga Good Weather credited as the “original novel” he burst out laughing. There’s not an iota of his book anywhere in the film. Made in the same year as Sono Sion’s A Man’s Flower Road, Hirano Katsuyuki’s Happiness Avenue (where Sono plays a role) is madder and more abandoned, in both filmmaking and content. Lovelorn Masahiro goes on an odyssey to find fulfilment of his heart’s desire, and the sea he traverses are Tokyo’s open sewages.
Imagine a surreal narrative, without dialogue, in a style reminiscent of the 1920s silent era and seen through the lens of moving voyeuristic camera that records the odd whereabouts of an unseemly group of marginal tenants.
25 years ago a mother and father went missing and were presumed murdered on Wolfe Island and their bodies never found, and now a tabloid journalist and a woman who may have a connection to the Island are out to find out Whodunit?
What are Ilona Herfurt and her boyfriend Dietmar Freistrath doing in the old mine? Where does the money come from that her son Jimmy finds under the newspaper? Where have the unique and intricately carved works of art, often passed down for generations, disappeared to from the village in the Ore Mountains? What do the carver Gerlach and his foster daughter llona have to do with it? Questions upon questions that are burning under the detective's nails.
Something very common in our days, an adolescent who does not find communication with her mother or stepfather falls into a depression that drags her down paths of difficult return.
The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.
Comments
Have you watched Happiness Avenue yet? What did you think about it?
