A Blue Automobile Review

Best known for his role as Smile in Ping Pong ARATA makes the step from secondary roles to the lead, dominating A Blue Automobile from start to finish. ARATA stars as Richio, an aimless young man drifting through his life working in a music store and as a DJ while generally resisting any sort of genuine human attachment.

The film opens with some genuinely unsettling imagery and it quickly becomes clear that Richio is one seriously scarred individual, both emotionally and physically. He lives his life behind a pair of bulky sun glasses, glasses that mask both the scarring around his eye from a childhood accident and any emotions that may otherwise slip out. If he has any family whatsoever they are completely absent and he seems to have only two connections in the world: his boss at the music store and his girlfriend, Akemi, a young business woman drawn to his rogue spirit. But even with Akemi, a woman who clearly loves him, Richio is often rude and brusque, abruptly rejecting any sort of overture that may lead to any sort of self-disclosure. Richio resembles nothing so much as a man tired of his life and all that entails and yet somehow unable to take the final step and end it all. Things take a turn, though not for the better, when Richio meets Akemi’s younger sister, Konomi, and begins a secret affair with her.

A Blue Automobile is a very formal film, very Japanese, filled with carefully composed static shots. With his stoic demeanor, sociopathic behavior and damaged eye ARATA seems to be aiming for a sort of Kitano-lite with his performance but, unfortunately, the character here – unlike his similarly restrained character in Ping Pong – simply doesn’t have the subtlety, or the film the needed quirks of plot and character, to make much more of Richio than a two dimensional cipher. While the decision to have Richio behind shades through the bulk of the film makes good sense from a story standpoint it ultimately does some serious damage to ARATA’s performance: with his dialogue so minimal and his expression so seldom changing the eyes are where we should be finding the intricacies of his character but those are denied to us for most of the film. He is at the beginning, and largely remains, a blank slate. When Richio finally does break out of his emotionless shell it lacks he kind of kick the sequence should have carried thanks to this one major flaw.

The other characters fare better, by and large. Richio’s boss is both richly written and well performed, a perpetual child living a perpetual rock and roll existence until forced to grow up by his divorce and fear of losing custody of his young son, and his alliance with Akemi gives the film many of its best moments. Akemi is positively luminous as a young woman embracing her adulthood and attempting to nurture the damaged souls around her. Konomi is granted significant depth as well, trying to find her way beyond high school and being buffeted by the forces of family, school expectations, and a confusing onslaught of emotions.

The aimless youth film makes up a fairly sizable sub-genre of its own in Japanese film. While A Blue Automobile is certainly a strong entry into that world it, unfortunately, lacks the emotional punch to really raise it above the pack.