TETSUY CHIHARA: ICE CREAM FEVER (2023) JAPAN CUDTS (July 10-21 2024)A playful, inventively told tale of women that revolves around an ice cream shop Adapted from a short story by award-winning author Mieko Kawakami, this is a tale of four women and begins in a delicate and playful manner, experimenting with pastel imagery, blurry and jiggly handheld camera images, and extreme closeups. Natsumi Tokita (Riho Yoshioka), a budding designer in a rut working part-time at the shop, becomes entranced by Saho Hashimoto (Serena Motola), a new customer, reserved, confident, dressed in black, whom Natsumi becomes fascinated with. She will turn out to be an initially feted novelist now struggling with a four-year writer’s block. Meanwhile, frequent customer Yû Takashima (Marika Matsumoto), who frequents a public bath (sentō) that she will later think of taking over, is surprised by a visit from her teenage niece Miwa (Kotona Minami), who has come to Tokyo in search of her estranged father—Yu’s ex and a source of resentment between Yû and her studious sister Ai (Yumi Adachi) Miwa’s mother. These darker, more serious elements are tempered by the pastel brightness and good cheer of the ice cream shop, where a women comes in pushing a stroller loaded with little twin girls, and the background features a jazzed-up, speeded-up version of Beethoven's Fifth.
Also working in the shop is Utaha (musician Wednesday Campanella), who is small and dresses like a punk schoolgirl. This film, which announces "This is not a film" before it begins, skips around playfully among its various young women. As Emily Jisoo Bowles puts it in her
Eastern Kicks review, which sees Sofia Coppola as an influence on the highly visual style, ice cream is "the sweetly sticky glue that connects the narratives." More importantly, the bright little ice cream shop sets a confidently cheery tone that also binds lives and events in the face of life's grimness - and the dominance of men. There are more women, who Bowles points out are "underused"; it's hard to keep track of them, especially since IMDb's cast list is inaccurate.
The four main women are chasing 小確幸 (Shōkakkō), Bowles suggests, using the term "coined by the Japanese novelist Murakami, which translates to 'a small but definite happiness,'" and for which ice cream and the ice cream shop no doubt are a metaphor. She further comments on the editing that its "playfully irreverent use" works like "a pink ping-pong ball" flying from scene to scene, and stopping time whenever there is a voiceover. This may be the most original film in the Japan Cuts series this year and it's more than just visually delightful, though if some of the characters feel a bit underdeveloped that shows this talented new filmmaker still may have more to offer us in her next outing.
Ice Cream Fever, 104 mins., debuted in Japan July 14, 2023, and also has been featured in Taiwan and Vienna. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-21).
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