HAPPY FLIGHT review
Shinobu Yaguchi's breakout movie, Waterboys, was a commercial and critical smash, elevating its writer/director from low-budget indie flicks to the big league. But the zany tale of a group of schoolboy losers who form a synchronized swimming team didn't do his creative muse much good. When it came time to make a proper follow-up (after the little-seen anthology Parco Fiction), he did the obvious thing: he made the same film again. 2004's Swing Girls was a much more polished piece of work, but there was no escaping the fact that its zany tale of a group of schoolgirl losers who form a swing band was kind of... familiar.
Based on the name alone, you could be forgiven for expecting Happy Flight, Yaguchi's latest feature, to be the zany tale of a group of university drop-outs who form a budget airline company. It isn't, thankfully. Breaking from the template of the films that made his name, Yaguchi's gone and made an ensemble piece. The end result might appropriately be subtitled "A Day at the Airport": centering around a flight from Tokyo's Haneda airport to Honolulu, it follows the work of the flight crew and the people on the ground, from air traffic control to the old geezer tasked with scaring birds with a shotgun so they don't fly into the engines of planes during take-off. On a purely educational level, it's fascinating stuff. (And on another level, it's a darn good advert for ANA, whose fleet is shown in quite loving detail.)
The nominal hero is Kazuhiro Suzuki (Seiichi Tanabe), a co-pilot who we first see on a disastrous simulated flight that ends up nose-first in a digitized Tokyo Bay. That doesn't bode well for his next trip, an assessed flight that will determine whether he gets promoted to the rank of pilot. Nor does the fact that his kindly examiner has come down with a cold, to be replaced by the grim-faced Harada (Saburo Tokito).
Suzuki isn't the only person on the plane hoping to make a good impression. It's flight attendant Etsuko's (Haruka Ayase) first international flight - and she's got to get through it under the stern gaze of Shinobu Terajima's lead attendant. Back on the ground, meanwhile, Natsumi (Tomoko Tabata) is fed up with her job working on the check-in counter, operation room director Takahashi (Ittoku Kishibe) is still getting to grips with the fangled computer system, the bird patrol guy (Bengaru) is having to contend with uppity animal rights activists, and... well, I could go on. (For the record, there's still the mechanics, radar operators, traffic controllers, airplane geeks and ordinary passengers - some of them with very foul tempers.)
That's a lot of plates to keep spinning, and Yaguchi does a pretty good job at it, moving everything along at a brisk pace without losing track of all the players. What's missing are any particularly involving storylines. Yaguchi's take on ensemble comedy is no match for that of compatriot Koki Mitani (let alone Robert Altman). While Mitani's The Uchouten Hotel was a film with a lot of characters in intriguing situations, Happy Flight just feels like a film with a lot of characters. Nice characters, yes, but a bit more dramatic interest wouldn't have gone amiss.
More damagingly, it's just not very funny. I watched Happy Flight in a reasonably full cinema and counted less than a dozen big laughs during the whole thing. The rest of it is breezy and agreeable enough, but for a comedy it's worryingly short on gags. All of which makes me wonder what Yaguchi was really trying to achieve here. As you may have guessed, the film's title isn't meant to be ironic. Happy Flight inhabits an insanely chipper universe, where no problem is so big that can't be overcome in a few minutes of screen time, and every character is just waiting for the right moment to give each other a wink and a cheerful thumbs up.
As it skips from one happily resolved situation to the next, it starts to resemble not so much a light comedy as an altogether different type of film. With its smiley workers, spurring each other on and performing their jobs to the best of their abilities... is it just me, or is Happy Flight inadvertently harking back to the golden age of socialist realism?
