Film review: Wood Job! successfully combines humour and forestry
This back-to-nature coming-of-age tale has a story arc that's fairly predictable — all the more so if you're familiar with writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi's reputation as a feel-good, zero-to-hero film specialist.
Starring: Shota Sometani, Masami Nagasawa, Hideaki Ito
Director: Shinobu Yaguchi
Category: IIA (Japanese)
This back-to-nature coming-of-age tale has a story arc that's fairly predictable — all the more so if you're familiar with writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi's reputation as a feel-good, zero-to-hero film specialist.
Even so, it's hard to resist the movie's considerable charm, much of which stems from its agreeable portrayal of a bucolic Japan seldom shown in the films of a country with an overwhelmingly urban population and whose timber industry is in decline.
Adapted — like Yuya Ishii's sublime (2013) — from a bestselling novel by popular author Shion Mura (one of whose grandfathers was a woodsman), the good-natured comedy centres on a city boy who enrols in a one-year forestry programme after failing his university entrance exams and being dumped by his girlfriend.
Eighteen-year-old Yuki Hirano (Shota Sometani) seems like a fish out of water in the rural environs of the green cooperative where he receives his lumberjack training.
But Yuki reveals a persistent side after a chance meeting with Naoki Ishii (Masami Nagasawa). A picture of her pretty face on the forestry programme's publicity brochure was what lured him to a place which has lots of trees, mosquitoes, leeches and snakes — and no mobile phone reception.
To refute Naoki's assumption that he's not be tough enough to complete the programme, Yuki stays the course. He's then assigned to work at Yamamato Lumber, located up mountain in the backwoods.
Although not thrilled by the discovery that he'll be working with, and staying at the home of, Yoki Iida (Hideaki Ito), a tough lumberjack whose ire Yuki had previously incurred, the trainee forester nonetheless slowly starts to enjoy the work and life in the rural hamlet — especially as it happens to be the place Naoki calls home.
Supported by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, appears unusually informative for a film in which the comedy often comes in the form of farcical sight gags.
But thanks to its director's deft hand, the film's message about appreciating and respecting nature successfully combine with the lighter elements.
The director shows that the gap between serious and hilarious can be bridged by a zany act of physical comedy.
opens on September 11
