In short: Ramblers (2003)

Original title: Riarizumu no yado

Some wild plan by their common actor acquaintance – and apparently money man – Funaki sends indie filmmakers Tsuboi (Keishi Nagatsuka) and Kinoshita (Hiroshi Yamamoto) off to a pretty run-down looking, and most definitely pretty cold, coastal town. Funaki is supposed to be waiting for them there and to have prepared accommodations in a local inn. Funaki’s late, though, and the inn is closed. The two virtual strangers will have to fend for themselves for several days, because Funaki’s not only very very late but also stops answering their calls altogether.

So there’s nothing to do for the two but to ramble and amble around town, talk about stuff and encounter various mildly strange people. For a time, a young woman named Atsuko (Machiko Ono) who may or may not have tried to commit suicide takes part in their misadventures.

As the description will probably already have made clear, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s (of Linda Linda Linda fame) Ramblers belongs to the quiet and deadpan type of Japanese comedy where the utter oddball craziness of other Japanese comedy seems to have been suppressed with help of the calm and quiet demeanour of the indie hang-out movie. There is situational comedy in the movie – actually quite a lot when you think about the actual situations and less about their presentation – but the film plays these things as calmly and quietly as its protagonists.

If they want, Yamashita and his cast can present a straightforward punchline as effective as the best of them, but the film is really much more interested in controlled non-reactions to the minor travails the guys have to go through. Often, both of them seem trapped in politeness, repressing authentic emotion not to be a bother to anyone, even when somebody else is at fault, or these emotions really should be expressed.

From time to time, on the other hand, in its worst moments, Ramblers is a bit too happy to let its characters express even their most banal thoughts, all too well emulating the experience of being trapped in some social situation with the most boring man (and it’s most definitely a man) possible. That, one can’t help but assume, it does on purpose, too.