Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) return to the seaside hotel in Izu where Sano met his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) five years prior. Following his wife’s death, Sano has come back to look for a red hat that she lost during their first visit. His grief over his wife’s death and regret over his failings as a husband are palpable as he spars with his friend, whose initiation into a cult known as ‘Super Happy Forever’ sees him adopting a permanently upbeat demeanour. At the halfway point, as Sano wallows in self-pity, the film takes us back to his wife Nagi’s arrival at the hotel and fateful meeting with him, switching the perspective of their relationship. Meanwhile, a Vietnamese cleaner at the hotel, An (Hoang Nh Quynh), works away dutifully, dreaming of a return to her home country.
Directed by Kohei Igarashi, from a script by Igarashi and Koichi Kubodera, “Super Happy Forever” is a character study of a young couple, the joy of their coming together, and the sense of desolation following a partner’s passing. The film will not appeal to everyone, with long scenes of characters gazing wistfully into the distance, or performing mundane routines, but the lead actors Sano and Yamamoto give exceptional naturalistic performances. They have a strong chemistry, capturing the awkwardness of a first meeting and the blossoming of romance, alongside deeper concerns about the direction fate is leading them. The film’s setting, the sunnny beaches of Izu, with the boundless sea stretching out into the distance, is perfect in reflecting both the sense of bright hopefulness along with the innate yearning for an ineffable happiness felt by the characters.
On the surface “Super Happy Forever” appears to be a straightforward tragic romance, with Sano’s deep sense of loss and isolation following his wife’s death at the forefront of much of the drama in the opening third. However, the film also offers a commentary on ideas of fate and the search for human connection in various forms. Coincidence plays a large role in many of the events of the film, for example when Miyata (who works as a nurse) is on hand to help a man who has suffered a cardiac arrest; and his latter meeting with two women who are in the same self-help community as him; Sano and Nagi’s initial meeting is also chalked up to being a fateful encounter. These coincidences, and auspicious and inauspicuous happenings, offer an insight into how humans relate to the vicissitudes of fate. The second theme that is strongly woven throughout relates to the human desire for tangible signs of affection in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity. When Nagi loses her red cap, and similarly when Sano later returns to search for it, their concern far outweighs the monetary value of it, but we come to realise that they are in fact looking for something deeper. For Nagi it symbolises her newfound connection with Sano; for Sano it is a way to redeem himself for emotionally neglecting his wife; while for An, on whom the film closes it perhaps represents her hopes for the future. For all humans, such items are imbued with significance as we strive to create meaning in a chaotic universe full of both love and pain.
Your review is very informative whilst keeping it very simple and straight to the point, I didn’t watch the movie myself but now I do have a desire to do so more