NYAFF Report: FINE, TOTALLY FINE Review
Forget what you think you know about Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine. You may think that since it features the first leading role from blank faced comic Yoshiyoshi Arakawa (life would be so much better if I were called Toddtodd), familiar from stacks of high energy Japanese cult flicks that this would be one of those, too. The fact that Arakawa’s character is obsessed with horror characters to the point of filling his bedroom with custom built demon creatures all featuring his own face would seem to bear this out. But it isn’t. Fine, Totally Fine is something quite different from the brightly colored hyper-kinetic cult flicks that we know Arakawa from, something far more subtle and unique.
Arakawa stars as Teruo, a thirty year old slacker who works part time as a park grounds keeper while dreaming about creating the world’s most convincing haunted house theme attraction. He lives to scare people and does so at every available opportunity without showing much concern for anything else, a fact most irritating to his terminally depressed, used-bookstore owning father. One of Teruo’s accomplices is Hisanobu, also thirty and working as a hospital administrator, overseeing the cleaning staff. Hisanobu seems to be Teruo’s exact opposite, friendly and outgoing and hyper organized and yet the pair spend their off time together staging pranks and acting in zero budget films for a mutual friend. But where Teruo seems content to do nothing more than scare people, Hisanobu can’t quite shake the feeling that at thirty his life should be offering considerably more than it is. Could life, perhaps, offer Akari? An incredibly clumsy woman – at one point she breaks her finger while trying to press an elevator call button – who Hisanobu hires at the hospital despite her awkward ways, Akari prefers to spend her off time watching one particular homeless woman, using her as the subject of drawings she shows to nobody.
And so begins one of the oddest and mellowest love triangles ever. Both Hisanobu and Teruo fall for Akari, a fact to which she remains blissfully ignorant. Not much in particular really happens throughout the film but the way in which it doesn’t particularly happen is what makes Fine, Totally Fine something special. Fujita’s work here has been compared to later period Katsuhito Ishii (think A Taste of Tea or Yama No Anato), which seems a fair enough comparison for while Fujita has a style uniquely his own the two directors share a dual love for the quietly absurd and simple, understated observation. By treating his characters as real people rather than overblown cartoons Fujita gives the film an elegance and dignity that neatly balances the playful absurdity and humor.
Fine, Totally Fine is a film that proudly proclaims that “life is more fun when you’re an idiot,” which is quite true, but it also remembers that even idiots need to pay their bills somehow and they need the company of other idiots to keep life tolerable.
