Critic Reviews

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.

If Nagi Notes is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout.

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.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

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.

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.

Much like the central sculptures that become the focal point of its best scenes, Kôji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” is a film defined by a sense that the filmmaker is trying to chip away at something.

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.

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.

Koji Fukada’s lovely film offers up unobtrusive but valuable lessons on the importance of accepting one’s reality while not shying away from reaching for what’s desired.