h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Already, before “Love Letter” and the short “April Story,” just on “Lily Chou Chou” and “Yentown” I’d been puzzling my taste for the work of director Iwai. He seems to enrage more than one critic I read, yet I’m able also to dote on critical icons Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Miike, and the like whose talents may exceed Iwai’s. Part of it may be Iwai’s use of space. There’s a rare silent, title forgotten, whose action for a reel or two floats between a sunlit kitchen and a just slightly brighter backyard. Camera and character choreography are so unobtrusively informative that, transported into the scene, I could have navigated the set spontaneously. I knew where the cabinets and table were, the windows, the door to the rest of the house. I knew what each side of the door to the yard looked like, how far it was from a tall hedge opposite, and that there was no step up from yard to kitchen. Plot and characters are gone from me, but the black-and-white kitchen and yard–with no tie to my life–I’ve never lived with kitchen open to a yard–are unforgettable. I’m not saying Iwai does quite that, but each film contains intriguing spaces. I don’t know where in “Lover Letter’s” junior high the library is, but there’s the displacement between the two young women’s towns, the group walking the highway that killed(Yes, it made me think of poor Arthur Dent; and much as in “The Guide” the protagonist here manages to bypass the destruction.)the presumed address, the overlapping presences when mourning woman visits her counterpart’s town: all things that could be mapped. Also mapable is the fact that that though the dead fiance's mother clearly has more in common with the doppelganger than with the mourning heroine, she never meets the former. “Yentown’s” refugee town’s existence outside the city doesn’t mandate transitions presented as road trips, yet most are. What I retain of “Lily Chou Chou” are rice fields under brightly lit overcast skies, the river of heads in which the murderer pursues with the current, then flees against it, school rooms and rape warehouse sunlit, residences often night lit. “April Story” contains a shot or two that seem to have been taken from the floor Ozu-style, I think I could make my way around its bookstore, and the dry fly-fishing lessons certainly represent an odd displacement. If you liked “Love Letter,” you should seek out and watch “Whisper of the Heart,” by a minor director, since passed away, at Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. (It’s on the Studio Ghibli Box Set, ebay and elsewhere.) By the time you hit the animated film’s library, you’ll know what I mean.

The DVDs on which I watched these–they happen to have been Korean with English or Korean subtitles but are presumably identical to the Japanese issue–hold clearest image I’ve seen. 4x zoom yields a viable image, and even 8x is this side of pixellated.

No idea what the odds are of Iwai having read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but my reference above makes me wonder to what extent "The Guide" may be, deep, deep down, a Iwai-like tearjerker.