Miki Satoshi's follow-up to Adrift In Tokyo (Ten Ten), the comic road movie that was a favorite at Udine last year, Instant Swamp is also about a journey - but more one of self discovery. Miki’s unique brand of dry, quirky comedy is still much in evidence, however, as is his affection for Japan’s odder corners and personalities. Also, the heroine does plenty of traveling, with her baggage including several tons of dirt.
She is Jinchoge Haname (Aso Kumiko), an editor at a publishing company who finds herself jobless after her magazine goes kaput. Then the guy she likes dumps her, and she finds herself scraping out a bare, lonely existence.
One day she finds a mysterious letter naming a certain Jinchoge Noburo (Kazama Morio) as her real father. After visiting her mother (Matsuzaka Keiko) in the hospital - the poor addled woman nearly drowned in a pond searching for the fabled kappa (water sprite) - Haname sets off for the address mentioned in the latter.
It turns out to be a tumbledown “antique”: (read:junk) shop run by Noburo AKA Denkyu (“Light Bulb“), a brusque, cagey man with an electro-shock hairdo. Haname refuses to believe that he is her father but Gus (Kase Ryo), a punk rocker who is a store regular, immediately sees the family resemblance.
From here on, a conventional plot would lead to a tender father-daughter reconciliation and a budding romance between Haname and Gus, dishy-looking despite his spiky hair. But Miki, who also wrote the script, delivers a stranger, more interesting story in which Haname falls victim to what seems to be Noburo’s cruel scam - and discovers the secret of that aforementioned dirt.
Aso Kumiko has played plenty of oddball characters in her career, from the cute-but-eccentric waitress in Café Isobe (Junkisa Isobe, 2008) to the proper-but-sexually-twisted bride-to-be in Then Summer Came (Tamio no Shiawase, 2008), but her Haname is something special: a woman who takes after her wacky father, but is also her own person, especially in her verging-on-pathological persistence. Her payoff - which also happens to be the film’s climax - is awe-inspiring.
Mark Schilling