Chie (Yoshitaka Yuriko), a 24-year-old OL (office lady), is not passively waiting for Mr. Right to come along or, as in her grandmother’s day, to be introduced by her parents. Instead, aiming to maximize her pleasure on this planet, she juggles five guys, hanging out with whoever strikes her fancy — or fulfills certain needs.
There’s the suave 54-year-old beauty salon owner (Enoki Takaaki) who underwrites her foreign travel plans, the tall, macho motorbike shop manager (Aoki Munetaka) who takes her on stress-relieving rides, the tousle-haired college kid (Yoshimura Takuya) who’s scrumptiously cute and the once-divorced sales exec (Kase Ryo) who listens patiently to all her troubles.
Finally, there’s Takumi (Hamano Kenta), a pudgy, pushy, uncouth guy who works in a bread factory and seems to have no good qualities at all, save an old-shoe familiarity (though she is not thrilled that he takes showers in her apartment as though it were the public gym).
Then Chie’s best friend Toshiko (Anne) announces that she is getting hitched — and urges Chie to consider matrimony as well. Chie brushes off this suggestion — freedom is wonderful — but begins to have second thoughts when she sees the happy glow on Toshiko’s face at the ceremony. Ever practical, she comes up with a plan — narrow her beaus down one by one and marry the survivor. Obviously, the first to go is Takumi.
Because Cannonball Wedlock (Konzen Tokkyu), director Maeda Koji’s debut feature, is a screwball comedy and Chie is so obviously full of herself, we know from the get-go that her splendid plan will blow up in her pretty face. What we don’t know yet is how ingeniously the script by Maeda and Takada Ryo, adapting his own novel for the screen, makes its various twists and turns not only funny, but right and true.
Bad screwball comedies assume that the mere fact of screwiness — the flouting of convention and common sense — is hilarious, when it’s merely tiresome. Maeda and Takada know that screwball comedy has its own logic and they scrupulously follow it in building to their comic pay-offs — and an ending that makes perfect (or rather perfectly absurd) sense.
Also, instead of slavishly following Hollywood formula, they add only-in-Japan elements, such as the scene of the sales exec and Takumi gleefully trading lines from the Manyoshu — a 1,300-year-old collection of poems that educated Japanese once knew by heart — as a bored and discomfited Chie looks on.
Imagine two guys in a Hollywood bromance quoting Shakespearean sonnets to each other as the woman they are ostensibly competing for silently steams. Wouldn’t happen, right? But in Cannonball Wedlock, this scene makes the characters more comprehensible, if not all completely sympathetic. That is, it lights them from different, not always flattering, angles.
Yoshitaka Yuriko, who made her award-winning acting debut in the Sono Sion shocker Noriko’s Dinner Table (Noriko no Shokutaku, 2006), plays Chie as a combination of charming ditz and self-centered princess — that is, likable and obnoxious in equal measures and, in some cases, the same breath. Yoshitaka maintains this difficult balance with little visible strain, similar to the way Bill Murray transformed his jerk weatherman in Groundhog Day into a semblance of a human being.
Also excellent is rocker Hamano Kenta as the disposable, but determined, Takumi. A professional comic might have played him solely as a slob loser who gets lucky, but Hamano gives him a winner’s confidence verging on arrogance. Still, he’s a hard sell as a romantic prospect, even as number five on Chie’s list.
The Japanese title, Konzen Tokkyu (literal translation: “Premarital Express”) may be a nod to the hit Ressha (Train, 1967-68) and Ryoko (Journey, 1968-72) series by Japan’s screwball comedy master, Segawa Masaharu. Their heroes, Atsumi Kiyoshi (Train) and Frankie Sakai (Journey), were hardly Clark Gable (start of the first screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, 1934), while their female foils, including queen-of-cute Baisho Chieko (Journey), were far above them in looks and often class.
Will Maeda also spin his brilliant debut into a series? Unlikely — but screwier things have happened, haven’t they?
Mark Schilling