スミコ22 「Sumiko 22」
Release Date: June 29th, 2024
Duration: 65 mins.
Director: Sawako Fukuoka
Writer: Sawako Fukuoka (Screenplay),
Starring: Haruna Hori, Satsuki Hamada, Ryo Anraku, Haruhi Ito, Tomoki Kimura, Shohei Matsuo, Kyoshiro Hara,
Sumiko 22 is a character study where a young woman searches for herself. Through her search, the film examines the pressures of joining society and work-life balance that contemporary Japanese young adults face. It was written, edited, and directed by Sawako Fukuoka, one half of the filmmaking unit Shidoromodori. For her solo directorial debut, which premiered in the Indie Forum of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024, she draws upon her own experiences for the material and recruits Haruna Hori (Jeux de Plage, Lonely Glory) to play the titular character making this Hori’s first lead role in five years.
We spend a September with Sumiko Shizuoka (Haruna Hori) in the days leading up to her 23rd birthday. Sumiko had worked in an office a month prior to the start of the film but now her days are split between lounging around at home in a share house and working at a small pizza bar as she tries to find a better sense of herself amidst an existential crisis that one can infer was precipitated by her old office job.
It isn’t immediately obvious and that is by deliberate design as her story is told with delicacy while asking only for our patience and understanding.
The film finds its structure and emotional tone through showing one odd little event per day that the typically cheerful Sumiko experiences. Many of these short vignettes are random encounters with everyday people who have gentle quirks that make Sumiko feel awkward.
Sumiko thinks about the odd feelings she gets when passing by a guy playing a recorder badly in an underpass. She tries to figure out how to tell a woman her panty line shows through her stretch jeans. She spends a day hanging out with housemates and talking about food or playing Frisbee. She draws crayon pictures of her beloved cat Okoge. Sumiko enjoys a small birthday party on the day she turns 23.
It is small-scale stuff. Nonsense. This is a feeling emphasised by the sense that Sumiko and her housemates have descended into a pre-adolescent state after seeing them lounge around like children while the musical score of plucked guitar strings, a recorder, a triangle plays out and there is a general sunny atmosphere. However, there is more going on underneath.
Between these seemingly light-hearted moments are a handful of weightier passages that break up our perception of an easy-going time.
Some days, nothing will happen. Sumiko sits in her darkened room and stares in silent contemplation. She takes selfies and despondently scrolls through pictures. She sits silently and childlike next to two female friends who feel more mature as they talk about menstruation and joke with her male boss (a funnily flummoxed Ryo Anraku). She does monthly budgeting and gazes at two paltry 1000 yen notes and towers of 100 yen coins. These scenes offer a peek into her struggle to find herself while an occasional narrator might make her existential angst a tad more explicit.
The film begins to play its hand fully with scenes where older characters bombard her with life advice or voices on the radio criticise what we see her do. Her angst finally comes out during a drinks party with former university classmates where Sumiko admits she quit her office job. “It was too difficult for me. I felt forced to do what I didn’t want to,” she shyly confesses while awkwardly revealing her new job at the pizza bar, perhaps feeling a bit of embarrassment over her status as an underemployed FREETER.
At first, I was sceptical about the lifestyle Sumiko had chosen. “As cute as it is, it isn’t sustainable…” However, with a gentle pace and lack of affectation, I was guided into Sumiko’s life and emotionally moved as her retreat into simple activities signalled a search for what fundamentally matters to her and so she earned my sympathy, particularly through those moments of self-doubt which were piercing, all by director Fukuoka’s clever design of contrasts as the light tone of the film’s chuckle-inducing comedy slid quietly into darkness and back into light as Sumiko’s days rolled by.
Adding to this was Haruna Hori’s performance which held my gaze. Yes, she can do cute with aplomb and there is a sweetness to seeing her grin as she colours in pictures but Hori embraces more melancholy shades and stillness and that carries through the idea that something is haunting Sumiko, that her cuteness masks an existential angst and the need to retreat from the world is necessary as she tries to work out how to approach it once again.
“You shouldn’t have to do what you don’t want to do,” one of her friends at the drinking party tells her as the others talk about the disappointments and compromises of adulthood and it is true. At first glance, Sumiko’s experiences seem inconsequential but it isn’t that Sumiko has given up on society, it is that she needs time to understand herself and the film really does establish this sense that she is trying. Sumiko’s seemingly small experiences have big implications. She asks questions and engages with people she meets and despite the self doubt, she goes out into the world. With every sign of effort, my initial impression was scepticism was overturned and the film won me over.
Sumiko 22 was screened at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024 on March 06 and March 07.
You can read an interview with the director here.