Drugstore Girl

[Aaron Gerow]

On 2004.2.17, at 08:12 ??, =%ISO-8859-1?Q?Tor_Bechmann_S=F8rensen?= 
wrote:

> I'd like to read the review but it seems that it has already been 
> taken off the online front page, and I cant seem to locate a search 
> function or an archived news function, so I'd be happy if you could 
> provide a direct link here on the list (as other people may be looking 
> too).

Sorry, but the Daily Yomiuri only posts its weekend section (containing 
my reviews) for a few days before taking it off the site. You need to 
pay for a subscription service to see their archives. My articles 
should be going on the Kinema Club site, but that has been frozen and 
is in limbo.

I hesitate to post the entire review to the list (we've had this 
discussion before), but here it is this time. It is not the final 
edited version (I don't have a copy of that), but it will give you an 
idea what I was writing about.

Title: Drugstore Girl
Director: Katsuhide Motoki
Starring: Rena Tanaka, Akira Emoto, Yuji Miyake, Masato Ibu, Yoshiko 
Mita, Yu Tokui
Rating: **1/2

Kankuro Kudo is a hot property. The 33-year old scenarist of such 
popular movies as Go and Ping Pong, and such hit television dramas as 
Kisarazu Cat?s Eye, is probably the only screenwriter in contemporary 
Japanese cinema who is featured prominently on the movie poster, 
sometimes earning even bigger billing than the director. As a result, 
he?s in demand, scripting a spate of recent films including Iden & Tity 
and Zebraman (opening on February 14). Adding on his work as an actor 
and rock musician, he?s a phenomenon, not just a man of the pen.
Drugstore Girl, directed by Katsuhide Motoki of the Tsuri baka nisshi 
(Free and Easy) series, is quite telling as a Kankuro picture. 
Hilarious in parts, it also reveals that his weakness lies precisely in 
rendering those parts into a story that can sustain a whole film.
	It is the succession of incidents that can be most promising. Keiko 
Obayashi (Rena Tanaka), a college student, comes home early one day 
after a class was cancelled only to find her live-in boyfriend taking a 
bath with another girl. The scene construction, the pacing, and Keiko?s 
offbeat dialogue upon discovering her infidel lover, are all brilliant 
and make us eager for more.
	Distraught (albeit comically), Keiko clambers on to the nearest train 
and rides it until the end of the line, a run down town called Masao. 
Wandering into a drugstore about to open, she unthinkingly spills out 
her emotional guts to a pair a gay clerks, and before she knows it ends 
up getting a part-time job there?even though it is hours from where she 
lives.
	This thoroughly enjoyable introduction sets up several expectations: 
What will happen to Keiko?s love life? How will she manage this job, 
the commute, and school? But as Kankuro is wont to do, such larger 
narrative issues are thrown to the side and in come another batch of 
offbeat characters.
Nabeshima (Akira Emoto), Numata (Yuji Miyake), and Yamada (Masato Ibu) 
are middle-aged members of the local commerce association whose already 
semi-comatose businesses?pharmacy, bakery, and liquor store, 
respectively?will be hurt with the opening of a drugstore that aims to 
sell all of their products. With their friends, they conspire to 
sabotage the store, but get waylaid by an unforeseen event: they all 
fall in love with Keiko.
	These detours head in yet another direction when the men, hoping to 
get close to Keiko, begin to play her collegiate sport: lacrosse. 
Taking pity on their pathetic efforts, she agrees to coach them, a 
humorous sight that even attracts the attention of the media. But when 
an American lacrosse team composed of Native Americans hears that the 
Masao Bamboo Boys, as they are called, include a suspicious character 
named Geronimo (really the local homeless man with long hair, played by 
Yu Tokui), they challenge the Boys to a battle.
	The jumps in plot construction are dizzying, but with Motoki making 
the most our of Kankuro?s witty dialogue and the delicious overacting 
of his middle-aged cast members, the film is enjoyable up to a point.
	But as with other Kankuro films like the movie version of Kisarazu 
Cat?s Eye, the young scriptwriter has a difficult time maintaining 
momentum or even consistency through all the switchbacks and detours. 
Keiko is abruptly switched from being our point of identification to 
just being a cute idol for lightly lascivious old men, and while the 
Bamboo Boys do get a few moments of sympathy for their efforts to 
revive a broken-down existence, even that is thrown out at the end for 
a gag or two.
	When Kankuro has a tight story to adapt with, such as in Go or Iden & 
Tity, he has a structure on which to hang his moments of dialogue, but 
in Drugstore Girl, he has to rely on the very tired clich?s, this time 
of the sports movie, to keep up flagging interest in the film. Unless 
he can learn to unify his anarchic films in non-narrative ways (like 
the geniuses Monty Python or Jacques Tati did), I think he had better 
learn how to tell a story.

Aaron Gerow
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu