When you’re a kid you always think you’re going to stay where you live forever. After all, there’s no reason to leave, it has everything you’d ever need, so leaving would be silly, it’s much easier to stay where you’re comfortable. Then you get older and you realise you’ve outgrown your place of comfort, you get an itching to see the world and you do whatever you can to move on. For Satoru Watarai (Gaku Hamada), he never felt this. He lives in the projects, and he thinks it’s the best place on earth and he wants to live there forever.
After Saturo has graduated from elementary school he decides he doesn’t need secondary school and drops out. His new plan is to wait until he’s 16 to get a job in his much beloved projects, a council housing estate which we’re informed has everything anyone would ever need – shops, schools, department stores and friends – so you never need to leave. Saturo takes this literally and plans to stay his whole life. He has his basic life skills and now has a daily route of working out, reading and patrolling the projects to make sure his old school friends are safe. While he’s socially awkward, he seems to have two friends, next door neighbour Haru (Yuri Matsushima) and shy bullied boy Kento (Noriaki Sonoda). We follow Saturo’s life in the projects as the years carry on and his friends slowly, one by one, begin to leave the projects. Saturo doesn’t mind this as he understands why people would want to leave, and it’s not up to him whether they stay, but for his own personal choice he doesn’t see the reason to. There’s more to this story than meets the eye and we soon find out the real reason why Saturo has his daily routine, and why he won’t ever leave the projects. And it’s not a secret that is kept from his friends and family who live in the projects, with his mother keeping a quiet, watchful eye over her son, somehow knowing that he’ll be okay, while everyone else thinks he’s a little odd.
See You Tomorrow, Everyone is the same production and acting team that made Fish Story and Sake-Bomb (Alex reviewed them), and while I’m not aware of those films, or the previous work of director Yoshihiro Nakamura, I now want to watch them because See You Tomorrow, Everyone was not only highly entertaining but very touching too. A nice blend of comedy and drama, See You Tomorrow, Everyone tells the emotional and layered story of a Japanese council estate as we get to see the lives of the sorts of people who live there. It tells the very real story about life, how friendships, family and relationships deeply effect us and how no matter what they’ll always be ever-changing and time will always keep moving forward. See You Tomorrow, Everyone is meant to be quite a different style of work for Nakamura who tells his story through the eyes of the simpleton Saturo who doesn’t want to move on with time, and is quite happy to live how he is with everyone around him for the rest of his life, but sadly as we know, that’s never the case.
This is one of those films that has a story that’s strange and intelligent at the same time. It’s humour and drama work together perfectly hand in hand and Hamada plays his role of Saturo wonderfully as the troubled, sweet and confused young man who’s just trying to get by living his own very unique life while everyone watches him in fascination and confusion.
Rating: A heart-warming and uplifting chronicle of a young man’s journey through life as he struggles with all of it’s great complexities (6/10).
See You Tomorrow, Everyone is available on DVD now from Third Window Films in the UK, check out the trailer below.
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