A man known to his customers only as Master (Kaoru Kobayashi) runs a small diner in Tokyo that’s open between Midnight and 7AM, catering to a crowd of regular night people and the occasional guest star. Apart from a tiny menu, Master offers whatever meal a guest asks for, if he can provide it. Apart from a pretty great cook, Master is also a kind, quiet and thoughtful problem solver and a mighty good listener who clearly can’t help himself when it comes to helping people, sometimes assisted by his small community of regulars. So the films see Master help out people like young, homeless Michiru (Mikako Tabe), who at first eats and runs but then becomes his assistant for a time, mends a broken heart or two, and helps take care of an elderly woman brought to Tokyo through a telephone scam.
Based on a manga that also spawned a popular streaming show, the two Midnight Diner movies belong to the kind of quiet, compassionate and unhurried feel good affairs certain Japanese directors have an astonishing ability to create. Joji Matsuoka’s Midnight Diner films are excellent examples of this form, with their calm, quiet and undemonstrative compassion, their belief in the power of community – as well as in the basic goodwill of communities – and carried by an idea that helping people also means meeting and understanding them on their own terms and at their own pace.
Where this sort of thing could easily drift off in the direction of kitschy teachable moments and schmaltz – some of the plotlines here could certainly play out rather melodramatically and trite – the Midnight Diners are simply too calm and collected for going there; they also feel absolutely genuine in their ideas of how compassion and human dignity interconnect. Also, these films never shy away from acknowledging that life can simply be hard, that the ones you love might not love you back, people die, and catastrophe’s hit – they go about the question of how to go on quietly and calmly afterwards.
Plus, they are really, really Japanese about food, and whose stomach would disagree?
On a filmmaking level, there are no spectacular flourishes here – Matsuoka creates a place, populates it, and then only lends small pieces of emphasis to the work of a fine cast of working actors – for whom Kobayashi provides an impressively calm and kind centre – and script.
Structurally, you can feel the manga source in both films – their structures are episodic but always satisfyingly connected through the material’s clear world view, and their philosophy of unfussy kindness.
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