Watanabe Hirobumi, Comic Poet of the Everyday

Many Japanese films are set in the countryside but few Japanese filmmakers are actually from their provincial locations. One is Watanabe Hirobumi, who was born, raised and still lives in Otawara, a small city in northern Tochigi Prefecture that is not much of a tourist draw or beauty spot. Farming is a major industry, while the landscape is on the flat, nondescript side. 
And yet over the course of seven feature films, starting with his 2013 debut And the Mud Ship Sails Away..., Watanabe has made Otawara the center of a cinematic universe that is uniquely his own, if reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch in its black-and-white aesthetic, punk attitude and off-kilter sense of humor. 

Watanabe works closely with his younger brother Yuji, who has provided the scores for all his films. Ranging from classical war horses to sinister electronic noise, the music often serves as ironic counterpoint to the on-screen action, such as raising the sonic tension level while the hero goes about his mundane daily round. 
And that round can mundane indeed: In the 2015 7 Days Watanabe plays the portly hero, who trudges down a windy path in the fields to his job in a cow barn and trudges back again, while never uttering a word, day after day. The object is not to test audience patience but rather to find droll visual poetry in the daily grind, filmed with spare, tight-focused beauty by Korean cinematographer Bang Woo-hyun, another frequent Watanabe collaborator.     

In the 2016 Poolside Man and 2018 Party ‘Round the Globe Watanabe portrayed the talkative foil to a working-class hero, played by long-time friend Imamura Gaku. As a mute, stone-faced Imamura drives, Watanabe delivers a monologue with hilarious observational gags that suggest an alternative career as a stand-up comedian. 
In the 2018 Life Finds a Way Watanabe played an indie movie director in Otawara, that is, a slightly skewed version of himself. While struggling to come up with a script and cadge money for his next film, the director delivers opinions on everything from film critics (which he loathes) to the music of the band Triple Fire (which he likes – and supplies the film’s score). 
The 2019 Cry, which won Watanabe the Best Director prize in the Japanese Cinema Splash section of the Tokyo International Film Festival, marks a return to the black comic minimalism of 7 Days. The hero (Watanabe yet again) tends pigs, not cows, but is otherwise a slave to routine, as well as a silent companion to his elderly, uncomplaining grandmother (another Watanabe regular who died that year at the age of 102). 

His latest film, I’m Really Good, focuses on three children: Fourth-grader Riko, her older brother Keita and her best friend Natsumi. The story unfolds over the course of a day, including Riko’s encounter with a sketchy salesman played by Watanabe, who offers her a great deal on textbooks. But when she tells him her dad is a policeman, he beats a hasty exit. Played by amateurs under their own names, the film’s central trio act like kids anywhere, with natural charm. 
As in the rest of Watanabe’s work, the cultural barriers in I’m Really Good are not even one-inch high. And it is all Otawara – and Watanabe – in every frame.