When teenagers see Mom and Dad goofing around or otherwise not acting their ancient age, they often react with embarrassment, scorn or the fervent wish that these so-called adults grow up. Then, hours or minutes later, these wise old 15-year-olds are goofing around themselves. That is, acting their age.
Unless the teenager is Hatsuki (Miyoshi Ayaka), the heroine of Yamamoto Toru’s comedy G’mor Evian!. Her mother, Aki (Aso Kumiko), is still the fun-loving, convention-defying punk rock guitarist she was when she had Hatsuki at age seventeen, though she looks the pulled-together businesswoman when she leaves in the morning for work. Hatsuki, on the other hand, earnestly shops, cooks, cleans and otherwise plays the grown-up in her single-parent house.
And though she and Aki are still best buddies, she is starting to question their carefree lifestyle, while longing for the safe, normal, middle-class existence of her bubbly best friend Tomo-chan (Nonen Rena).
Then Yagu (Oizumi)Yo, the vocalist in Aki’s band and Hatsuki’s sort-of step-dad, who lit out for parts unknown two years ago, sudden re-appears their lives, frizzy-haired and fizzy like a cartoon character high on energy tonic. An annoyed Hatsuki has another grown-up kid on her hands.
Working from a novel by Yoshikawa Toriko, Yamamoto and scriptwriter Suzuki Kenichi build on their mental-age-reversal premise with wit and heart, though their story’s eventual destination is no surprise.
They not only frame it from Hatsuki’s perspective, but complexify her and her unusual family beyond the demands of local comic formula.
The entire film, in fact, is extraordinarily well-constructed and well-acted, despite its episodic surface and sitcom situations. The plot is little more than one important arrival (Yagu’s) and one important departure, but in the process Hatsuki learns what family and friendship mean (which is not society’s conventional definition), as well as how to think of others instead of always and forever herself. That is, she starts to grow up.
For all the familiarity of this story, there is nothing preachy or clichéd in its telling. Hatsuki and Aki finally have a big heart-to-heart, just like countless movie daughters and mothers, but they are natural and open with each other, without indulging in the usual theatrics.
Newcomer Miyoshi Ayaka plays Hatsuki as an adolescent bundle of contradictions: sweet and charming one moment, cool and even cruel the next. She aces the tests of her strait-laced English teacher (Koike Eiko) and impresses a hip flea market seller (Anna Tsuchiya) with her taste in punk rock, but is neither a grind nor a rebel.
As Yagu, Oizumi Yo clowns broadly for laughs, but he also knows when to dial it back. When Hatsuki cries bitter tears of regret, Yagu responds sincerely and wisely – and we see that he is more than he seemed at first glance. We don’t hear his full story until the end, though it is one he has been implying with every word and gesture from the beginning.
Mark Schilling