‘Super Happy Forever’ Review: A Gentle Japanese Charmer

Five years separate the two halves of “Super Happy Forever,” a delicate, unassuming but subtly complex love story in reverse that doesn’t dart between timelines, instead offering the past as a bittersweet chaser to the present. It’s a gap short enough for little to have changed at the sleepy Japanese beach resort where the film is set: Faces and places stay much the same, though melancholic protagonist Sano (Hiroki Sano) has perhaps too much faith in the time-bridging powers of a hotel’s lost-and-found desk. A key absence, however, makes every carried-over similarity from the past feel to Sano like a cruel reproach. In Kohei Igarashi‘s elegant fourth feature, the stifling atmosphere of grief precedes our acquaintance with its object; our sadness laps Sano’s own.

A mellow opening film for this year’s Venice Days program, the ruefully titled “Super Happy Forever” sees Igarashi working in a breezier, more Rohmer-ian register than his 2017 Venice Orizzonti premiere “The Night I Swam,” a dialogue-free collaboration with gifted French outlier Damien Manivel, who returns here as editor and co-producer. This Gallic-Japanese co-production will burnish Igarashi’s reputation on the festival circuit, though it may be too low-key for theatrical distribution in many markets — its youthful slant and quiet formal simplicity make it a viable fit for specialist streaming platforms.

“Was this the room?” asks Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata), Sano’s best friend, as they idle in a plush hotel suite with a glorious picture-window view of Japan’s Izu peninsula coastline — all wide pastel skies and serene lapis waters. Turns out it is indeed the room where they stayed five years before, on a vacation far less loaded with emotional baggage, and that’s no accident. Sullen and withdrawn, Sano is determined to retrace the steps of that trip, as if reenacting the past can somehow give him a second crack at it. For it was at that same resort, on that carefree vacation, that Sano first met Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto, wholly beguiling), the cheerily outgoing young woman who would, at some point in the next half-decade, become his wife, and at another, suddenly and unexpectedly die in her sleep.

With Sano too irretrievably in his feelings to talk much, we’re left to surmise, from hints and flickers of expression and temper, what shape the couple’s cruelly curtailed relationship took — and why there appears to be an undercurrent of guilt to his debilitating grief. (He does admit that she wasn’t happy, while he was “cowardly and selfish.”) Miyata’s attempts to draw him into the present, with new-agey wellness seminars and a potential double date with two winsome young women, are well-meant but ill-judged. (The title stems from the aggravatingly upbeat jargon of a workshop Miyata attends with these new prospects.) We’re left to wonder, too, what’s happened to this friendship in the last few years, and if they’re straining for a chumminess that no longer comes naturally.

The film’s two chapters are set in 2023 and 2018, with the global pandemic a temporal marker that’s both undiscussed and, the closer we look, plainly felt: a former favorite café is shuttered, and we learn the hotel is set to close for good after the summer season. It’s also evident, perhaps, in the stiff reticence of Sano and Miyata’s interactions, the futile pretense that they can chase the past in a changed world.

When we step into 2018, there are no immediate visual or editorial cues to signal the flashback: DP Wataru Takahashi’s unfussily composed lensing paints in the same brisk, bright daylight throughout. Yet we can feel the film’s burdened mood lifting, its lungs filling again with salty air, even before we identify Nagi — gangly and camera-toting and button-cute, with a Jesus Loves You T-shirt that feels haphazardly chosen — as the figure who’s been haunting the film thus far. In another context, her meet-cute with Sano on a ferry would promise a neat arc of romcom dots to be connected; here it’s imbued with a sharp fatalism.

The mutual attraction that builds quickly but not torridly between the two is the stuff of perfect first dates and their moony afterglow, but there’s not much to suggest they’re soulmates, bound for shorter-than-planned life. The poignancy of “Super Happy Forever” lies in its unseen tensions, its negative spaces, and the ellipsis of five years where its characters assumed they had all the time in the world to recreate this level of happiness. All the while, Bobby Darin’s swing standard “Beyond the Sea” — a song that matches the film’s odd balance of sorrow and insouciance — forges connections between its drifting characters and separated timelines. Igarashi’s coolly moving miniature doesn’t exhort viewers to do anything so obvious or sentimental as seize the day: merely to hold onto it, for a year or two or five, and to let go of it when the time comes.