Nagi Notes

The secret longings the characters have been carrying for one another are eventually disclosed with almost offhand casualness. By the film’s end, we know them with unusual intimacy. In any case, the revelations feel nearly incidental. Fukada is less interested in what these people have done than in who they are when left alone with themselves.

Nagi Notes, however, happily sees the director returning to the form of his 2016 breakout Harmonium, with the precision of its characterization and the balance between heartfelt emotional candor and pensive silence in its finely worked script.

It’s such a seamless, harmoniously composed work, effortlessly edited and elegantly shot, that it’s almost too easy to just drift along with it, like floating down a river on a canoe, letting its currents take control. This isn’t a grabby, attention seeker of a film, but a quiet, watchful sort of movie that whispers its secrets sotto voce.

Low-key but spanning a symphony of disturbing themes from personal relations and wildlife conservation to the threat of war, Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’ offers a fascinating, multi-faceted perspective on insular Japan today.

Fukada is perhaps at his most elegantly demure as he juxtaposes two developing relationships rapidly progressing during one week in the titular rural area located in Okayama Prefecture.

In its unassuming way, the film is a celebration of creativity and of emotional connections forged through art. But Nagi Notes is unassertive in its themes and, at times, gentle almost to a fault.

This contemporary Japanese drama centers on the relationships between two vaguely thirtysomething women and two middle school-age boys. Two pairings that find a common connection in the most unexpected of circumstances. It’s the context of their attractions and the contradictions Fukada delicately presents that eventually beguile the viewer, even if his restrained aesthetic may test your patience getting there.