ALWAYS - 三丁目の夕日 Sunset on Third Street
Always is best described as a chronicle of the events in the lives of the citizens of a small Tokyo district in the final year of Tokyo Tower’s construction. The key characters are the Suzuki family (led by “Suzuki Auto”) and frustrated author Chagawa Ryunosuke (”Mr. Literature”). The periphery characters revolve around them to detail a year of great change in their attitudes.
The situations that these characters are placed in are fairly generic, with country girl “Roku-chan” (actual name Mutsuko) finding herself working in an anti-climactic job at Suzuki Auto and Chagawa finding himself lumbered with a ten year old boy, Junnosuke, who acts to make him somewhat less misanthropic.
These characters are written in broad strokes but this is the sort of film that makes that a selling point. These are the sorts of people that the audience is supposed to know, and that foreign audiences who have knowledge of other Japanese films will have little trouble recognising.
Chagawa is the funny misanthropic slob; Suzuki Auto is the good humoured but bad tempered patriarch of legend; Roku-chan the traditional country bumpkin with a good heart. Chagawa’s love interest, Hiromi - played with power by Koyuki - is the film’s highlight, one of the few people who exists with a somewhat sinister darkness and, more importantly, the remorse needed to overcome the darkness.
The strangest part of the film is the few minutes devoted to the local doctor, who sometimes drinks too much and deludes himself into believing that his wife and daughter are still alive. This part of the film is understandably depressing and there is no solution to it. The director therefore makes no effort to solve it - and this sort of strength means that the sentimentality has never been overplayed or misplaced.
The introduction to this film made it clear that director Takashi Yamazaki is a veteran Visual Effects Director, and one of the people behind the Resident Evil game franchise. Only twice do we get flights of fancy, in the forms of the Shounen Bouken and Suzuki Auto’s rampage. Otherwise the film is quite subdued and seems exactly like countless others set in the era.