Toying around with timelines and chronology has long been a staple of the romance genre. Japanese director Kohei Igarashi makes his addition to the canon with Super Happy Forever, showing the widower Sano (Hiroki Sano) returning to the seaside resort of Izu where he met his late wife, before then going back in time to show their fateful encounter. It’s a relatively simple switch of two halves which might try one’s patience at times with the colder, more emotionally distant first half, but where the second half contextualises and makes the overall narrative all the more moving and rewarding.
Sano is introduced to us sitting in his hotel room stoically staring at the seaside views, as his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) tries to cheer him up and encourage him to go out and participate in some activities with him. By showcasing Sano at his lowest of lows, we’re granted a perspective of him as a rather irascible figure, compartmentalising his grief through a curt and blunt dissolution to everyone around him even as they interact with him with good intentions. Though understandable as we learn what has happened, it can be frustrating to see him reject Miyata’s every attempt to cheer him up. Coming back to Izu seems to have been the wrong choice as he spends his time wandering around trying, and failing, to find traces of his late wife’s presence.
This is all deliberately done by Igarashi as a way to set up the flashback to five years prior when Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) meets her future husband, Sano, on holiday. Yamamoto breathes a lively bit of fresh air into the film and instantly makes us see how Sano instantly fell for her, and retroactively makes her absence in the first half of the film all the more poignant. There’s quite a bit of fun in her interactions with Sano: a conversation about films where she espouses her love for Rob Zombie’s Halloween over John Carpenter’s original will surely tickle cinephiles, and a post-nightclub meal of noodles is adorable and charmingly relatable.
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The choice of Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” being played during karaoke forms a full circle narrative beautifully, as does the character of An (Hoang Nh Quynh), a Vietnamese immigrant who befriends Nagi and who ties the two timelines together.
The recurring item of a red cap that Sano is desperately searching for at the beginning of the film comes into play as we see why it means so much to him as a remnant of her memory. Igarashi demonstrates a deft touch in showing how pieces of Nagi, particularly their time together in Izu, have left a mark in Sano that might never fully heal.
Though the approach of Super Happy Forever requires patience and emotional investment with its deliberately more guarded approach, as the film unravels it makes its purpose all the more clear and movingly finds its way into our hearts.
