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Mitsuko Delivers

Mitsuko Delivers

Directed by Yuya Ishii
2011
109 mins

Review by Susan Meehan

Mitsuko Delivers: the title made me think of the very funny film by the same director with a similar title, Sawako Decides [川の底から こんにちは] and it did dispense the same style good humour and feel good factor.

The screening at the ICA (11 March 2012), a year to the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and a charity showing organised by Adam Torel, Director of Third Window Films, was a complete sell-out. Adam introduced the film and said that the money raised would be donated to the Fukushima International Festival for Children’s Future. He also had DVDs on sale at a reduced price to raise money for the same cause. His initiative was rightfully acknowledged with thunderous applause. He chose to show Mitsuko Delivers due to its upbeat positive message and because the film wraps up in Fukushima.

Mitsuko is pregnant and alone. We see photos of burly American soldiers on one of her walls at home and assume that one of them has knocked her up and dumped her. She remains surprisingly undaunted and spirited.

She calls her parents and they have a cursory chat. They are much happier to hear Mitsuko than she is to talk to them. After confirming that all is well in California, she hangs up. California?!  Popping out of her flat, the familiar Japanese landscape immediately becomes apparent. She lives in a flat in Tokyo and pays a visit to her Japanese doctor who pronounces that her delivery will most probably be tough as the pregnancy hasn’t ever really settled. The ever-optimistic Mitsuko pronounces she’ll be fine and returns home.

Mitsuko clears out her flat and with less than ¥300, walks out following in the direction of the wind. Handing over her money to an unemployed man she is completely broke and cannot even afford the taxi which takes her to the modest working class alley where she lived as a kid over 15 years ago.  She barges in on the now rather elderly and bedridden landlady, Kayo, who takes her in. Settling back in, Mitsuko then goes to “Yoichi’s restaurant” for a generous helping of food.

For plucky Mitsuko everything is, quite simply, either cool (iki) or uncool.  Friendship is cool, a sour face is not cool; being dumped by her American lover is definitely uncool. Though the landlady chastises her for her use of ‘iki,’15 years back, in the years soon after the economic bubble had burst, it was she who exhorted everyone to live a ‘cool’ life and to help each other. Her mantras were humanity and cool. Fifteen years on, all Kayo’s tenants in the alley have left to buy their own flats, leaving her in the lurch.

Mitsuko and her parents had sojourned in the working class alley only temporarily while waiting to be able to reopen their pachinko parlour. As they leave, little Yoichi tells Mitsuko that they’ll marry when they’re older because he loves her.

Back to the present, Yoichi is on ‘granny’ duty and visits Kayo. “That’s cool,” observes Mitsuko, noticing that ‘humanity’ has not totally disappeared.  As Yoichi leaves he announces that he will look after Mitsuko’s baby; she’s ‘cool’ with that.

Mitsuko starts helping out at the restaurant by cleaning tables and going out onto the street to pull in clients. She turns around the ailing restaurant and proceeds to find other people to help.

Yoichi wants to marry Mitsuko but can’t. He was abandoned as a kid and taken in by his kindly ‘uncle’ Jiro who has cared for him ever since and, consequently, never married. Mitsuko dreams up a plan and takes matters into her own hands in order to encourage uncle Jiro to marry his sweetheart, a coffee shop owner. She is in the midst of sorting out the lives of Jiro, his sweetheart, her son, Kayo and Yoichi when she notices her parents are in the tenement. They’ve returned as their pachinko parlour has failed again. They are stunned at seeing a heavily pregnant Mistuko.

A bun fight ensues with the parents wanting an explanation, Yoichi standing up for Mitsuko, Kayo not wanting to go to Fukushima, Jiro declining to marry the coffee shop owner, Yoichi proclaiming that he will marry her instead and on and on.

Taking control and making everyone shut up, Mitsuko drives them all to Fukushima, where the coffee shop owner’s ill mother lives. A revived Kayo tells her that her condition is all in her mind, Jiro finally asks for the coffee shop owner’s hand.  Mitsuko formidable as always will continue to look out for Yoichi and, in the middle of bucolic Fukushima fields, having sorted everyone’s lives out, she is about to deliver!

Good and hilarious in parts and despite having a ballsy and gorgeous heroine, Mitsuko Delivers has, on the whole, a weak plot and no character development. It is also predictable and too long to hold one’s attention throughout.