The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue (2017)

The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue: Directed by Yûya Ishii. With Shizuka Ishibashi, Sôsuke Ikematsu, Ryûhei Matsuda, Paul Magsign. Newcomer Shizuka Ishibashi throws herself into the role of Mika, a nurse by day, a ‘girlie bar’ hostess by night, subject to feelings of anxiety and isolation, and unable to reach through a hard outer shell that stops her from expressing tenderness to anyone else. Sosuke Ikematsu, one of Japan’s most important young actors, stars as Shinji, who struggles as a day-hire construction worker with a sense of impending doom, but who still tries to find the source of an unnamable hope he feels inside. The setting is Tokyo in 2017, where empty words, a sense of doom, and feelings of isolation co-exist with hope, trust, and love. In the sense of real life conjured up in these two people is a new kind of film: the densest kind of love story.

“This one is determined to be purest art movie. It is derived from a book of poems and centers on exploited one eyed construction worker Sôsuke Ikematsu, hired on the the 2020 Tokyo Olympics who pairs with Shizuka Ishibashi a nurse and part time girlie bar waitress who feels deserted after her motheru0026#39;s suicide. Her friends tell her to stop talking about death. The film totally lacks the forward momentum of a commercial movie, going through developments that have no baring on the outcome and creating a dozen moments where you expect to see an end title come up, unavailingly. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe background is quite vivid – the detailed construction site which is destroying the workersu0026#39; bodies, the dormitories and bars where they drink to make their lives less miserable, the girls-only apartment block where Ishibashi is keeping a surprisingly high maintenance turtle in a temperature controlled tank with an air raid warning monitor. The pair wander through the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts of Tokyo encountering oddities like a flying airship, a lovable puppy that is captured, caged, put down and incinerated in cartoon animation and an ignored girl busker, who no one takes any notice of, singing about armpit sweat. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eDirector Yûya Ishii explained that his film is meant to show the things happening around people of which they take no notice. He has a following on the festival circuit. Bracket him with Hirokazu Koreeda.”