Super Happy Forever
A film of two halves, Kohei Igarashi’s romantic drama is a meditative and individual, if ambiguous, study of love and loss.
Image courtesy of Mubi.
Watching this Japanese film proved to be for me a somewhat unusual experience. That was because, although recognising the piece as having a pleasingly individual character, I felt at the same time that it was not conveying to the full what it wanted to say. Super Happy Forever is a work by Kohei Igarashi who directed it and wrote the screenplay with Koichi Kubodera. It’s set throughout in a seaside resort on the Izu Peninsular but it falls very much into two parts. In the first the year is 2023 and we see Sano (Hiroki Sano) returning with his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) to the hotel where five years earlier they had encountered the young woman who would become Sano's wife, Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto). They are even staying in room 819 specially chosen because that was the very room which had then been Nagi’s. These scenes take up almost half of the film’s length during which time it becomes clear that Sano is seeking to engage in depth with his memories of meeting Nagi. That’s because despite her young age she has died in her sleep and he is now a widower haunted by the past. Thereafter the film moves not forward but backwards to portray that time in 2018 when the two of them had quickly recognised a shared outlook on life and sensed that their meeting had been meant to happen. Only in the last few minutes of the film will we return to 2023.
This is the fourth feature by Kohei Igarashi who was born in 1983 but whose previous work is unknown to me. What he gives us here is a meditative piece which has its own style and is quite distinct from any current trends in today's cinema. It's an approach that gives the film a voice of its own while its concern with love and loss invites viewers to identify with the emotions it explores. Photographed by Wataru Takahashi, this is an atmospheric work but one which encourages speculation and interpretation since the story told is not fully fleshed out. The first half may begin in room 819 but the film takes its time to make it clear to us that the girl lost to Sano is indeed dead albeit that his obsession with her and his sense of grief are apparent. If the rather sparse dialogue doesn't always help to clarify the situation (Miyata when referring to Nagi tells Sano that five years on he won't find her), the mood of the piece speaks for itself. The fact that the hotel in question is on its last legs and due to close at the end of the month adds to the sense that time brings change and that one cannot go back. Similarly, when Sano and Miyata go out walking, they locate a restaurant visited in 2018 but it is no longer functioning. The sombre mood is also expressed through Daigo Sakuragi’s music score which is all the more effective because it is not overused. Even so, while the material is such that a degree of minimalism is appropriate, one does sense that extending this opening section to forty minutes is slightly overdoing it.
When the films switches to 2018 it also changes its viewpoint in the sense that what now unfolds is seen largely through the eyes of Nagi. Hiroko Sano and Yoshinori Miyata are able actors who fit their roles well but the player who shines here is the actress Nairu Yamamoto. The extensive portrayal of the coming together of Nagi and Sano inevitably creates a change of tone in the film but Yamamoto is engaging in a very special way. It may have been the scenes of Nagi going around with Sano and Miyata that put me in mind of Godard (they distantly echo his 1964 film Bande à part) but, as Super Happy Forever unfolds, one increasingly finds that its narrative features the theme of chance and its key role in our lives that is so prominent in much of the work of Jacques Demy, not least in Lola (1961). Here too happening to be at the right spot at the right moment (or not) is crucial.
The second half of Super Happy Forever is certainly appealing but overall the film leaves one uncertain how it should be read. Some might be tempted to treat it as a straightforward tale of love found and then lost which encourages one to accept life’s downsides and to appreciate the memory of the best times. However, it cannot be insignificant that the film’s opening segment includes a brief moment in which Sano looking back on his life with Nagi admits that she was not happy and that he himself had been at fault. If taken on its own the section relating to 2018 suggests a dream come true, the start of a great love, but Sano’s comments which are all we know of their subsequent relationship could be taken as an indication that such expectations were illusory. If most other figures in the tale are distinctly subsidiary, one that is not is that of a Vietnamese girl named An played by Hoang Nhu Quynh. In 2018 she had just been taken on as a hotel maid and in 2023 just ahead of it closing she is moving on. Her role in the story is linked to an incident concerning a red hat. It had been purchased by Sano and given to Nagi as a present, but she had then lost it. Ultimately, the hat takes on a symbolical role: but does it come to suggest that if one love story ends another will begin or is it a much less positive sign that, as with Sano and Nagi, all lovers are likely to find that the promise of a wonderful love is something of a myth? The title of Igarashi’s film may sound brashly confident but in his tale the notion of being super happy forever is linked to the title of a symposium and is mocked. So just what interpretation represents Igarashi's intention here?
This is a film that avoids the clichés of romantic fiction while seeking in its own way to comment on the relationship of couples and that certainly makes it interesting. But for me despite it having many qualities this is a work ultimately too ambiguous for its own good. To some extent the way in which it misses the mark is summed up by its repeated use of the song ‘Beyond the Sea’. Two characters are heard attempting to sing it (in Sano’s case his limited singing ability adds a touch of pathos), but Bobby Darin's recording is in effect thrown away since it is only used over the end credits. In total contrast to that, Miguel Gomes in his 2024 film Grand Tour unexpectedly featured Darin's treatment in a final scene that unleashed its full emotional power in a quite exceptional way. There we knew where we were but here, striking though much of it is, Super Happy Forever leaves us (or me at least) on shifting sands.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Hiroki Sano, Yoshinori Miyata, Nairu Yamamoto, Hoang Nhu Quynh, Tomo Kasajima, Miu Kainuma, Shunsaku Yajima, Tomomitsu Adachi, Yuko Kageyama, Goichi Mine, Saki Kato, Masato Ito.
Dir Kohei Igarashi, Pro Makoto Oki and Yusaku Emoto, Screenplay Kohei Igarashi and Koichi Kubodera, Ph Wataru Takahashi, Pro Des Masato Nunobe, Ed Kohei Igarashi, Keiko Okawa and Damien Manivel, Music Daigo Sakuragi, Costumes Kento Asai.
MLD Films/Nobo LLC/Incline LLP/High Endz-Mubi.
94 mins. Japan/France. 2024. UK Rel: 4 July 2025. No Cert.
