European Premiere | In Competition | Best Screenplay Candidate
Ohku Akiko is best known for directing films about single women on the lookout for love, including her 2017 breakout hit Tremble All You Want. Matsuoka Mayu starred as a nerdy office worker obsessed with ammonite fossils – and a teenage crush she never got over. But as Ohku’s latest, She Taught Me Serendipity, shows, her films are not purely or even mainly rom-coms. When their stories turn serious, the pain of the protagonists becomes all too real.
The film is also her first with a male protagonist, a quirky college student played by rising star Hagiwara Riku. But the two women who enter his small world are strong personalities in their own right; Hagiwara’s Konishi Toru is a weak reed by comparison.
Based on Fukutoku Shusuke’s novel and scripted by Ohku, the film is thus something of an ensemble piece, with each of the three main characters delivering a long soul-baring monologue at various points in the story. This goes against current commercial scriptwriting practice, which accommodates shrinking audience attention spans by keep dialogue punchy and short.
But instead of being soporific rambles, these monologues have a sincerity and poignance that go straight to the heart. One in particular is a blazingly emotional standout that, in a one-woman play, would steal the show.
We first see Toru returning to the campus of his Kyoto university after a long hiatus. He’s carrying an open umbrella on a sunny day with not a trace of self-consciousness. He meets his only friend, the goofy loquacious Yamane (Kurosaki Kodai) and in the evening goes to his part-time job cleaning a public bath. His co-worker, the bubbly Sacchan (Ito Aoi), is a fellow student as well as the talented lead singer and guitarist in an amateur band.
But Toru’s attention is drawn to Sakurada Hana (Kawai Yuumi), a loner girl with her hair up in a bun who is in one of his lecture classes. He contrives to make her acquaintance and discovers that she more than matches him quirk for quirk – one of her first questions to him is whether he has ever turned the TV volume up to the max. She also accepts him for what he is, oddball personality and all. Toru believes he’s found his soulmate and after they part literally jumps for joy.
The film’s opening scenes are fizzy with comic energy, generated by both the chemistry between the two leads and Ohku’s punchy, out-of-the-box dialogue. But the story also strikes deeper notes early on.
When Toru and Hana go to an aquarium – that go-to first date destination in Japanese romantic dramas – they talk about people dear to them who have died – Hana’s father and Toru’s grandmother. Feeling guilty for neglecting her in the years she was declining into dementia, Toru breaks down in tears. Hana accepts that too.
Wrapped up in this new relationship, Toru becomes indifferent and callous toward Sacchan, who is secretly in love with him, and Yamane, who feels disrespected. That is, Toru acts like a jerk. And it blows up in his face.
The film, however, does not make black and white judgements about its flawed protagonist. Faced with the consequences of his actions and words, Toru suffers and grows.
And with no sentimentality whatsoever, She Taught Me Serendipity illuminates the message implied in its title: Once in a while life gifts us with a lucky encounter. But if we are self-involved idiots we can turn that luck into everlasting regrets.
Ohku Akiko
Ohku Akiko (b. 1968) graduated from Meiji University and studied at a school for aspiring comics. At age 27, she entered a Tokyo film school and in 1999 released her first theatrical feature as a director, Igai to Shinanai. Her commercial and critical breakthrough was the 2017 Tremble All You Want. Her follow-up My Sweet Grappa Remedies, which screened at Udine FEFF in 2020, was a female friendship drama whose title was inspired by the famous Friulian drink. Her latest, the romantic drama She Taught Me Serendipity, is her first film with a male protagonist.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1999 – Igai to Shinanai
2017 – Tremble All You Want
2020 – My Sweet Grappa Remedies
2020 – Marriage Hunting Beauty
2020 – Hold Me Back
2024 – She Taught Me Serendipity