‘Super Happy Forever’ Review: Nostalgia Can’t Mend a Broken Heart In a Gentle Japanese Charmer
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Five years separate the two halves of “Super Happy Forever,” a delicate, unassuming but subtly complex love story in reverse that doesn’t dart between timelines, instead offering the past as a bittersweet chaser to the present.
It’s a gap short enough for little to have changed at the sleepy Japanese beach resort where the film is set: Faces and places stay much the same, though melancholic protagonist Sano (Hiroki Sano) has perhaps too much faith in the time-bridging powers of a hotel’s lost-and-found desk.
A key absence, however, makes every carried-over similarity from the past feel to Sano like a cruel reproach. In Kohei Igarashi‘s elegant fourth feature, the stifling atmosphere of grief precedes our acquaintance with its object; our sadness laps Sano’s own.
A mellow opening film for this year’s Venice Days program, the ruefully titled “Super Happy Forever” sees Igarashi working in a breezier, more Rohmer-ian register than his 2017 Venice Orizzonti premiere “The Night I Swam,” a dialogue-free collaboration with gifted French outlier Damien Manivel, who returns here as editor and co-producer.
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