Fine, Totally Fine (2008) DVD

In the opening scene of Fine, Totally Fine, an elderly homeless woman fashions discarded trash into colourful sculptures, while she is herself secretly made the subject of a series of paintings by amateur artist Akari (Yoshino Kimura). Sure enough, Yosuke Fujita’s debut elevates those who would normally be regarded as life’s cast-offs into avatars of slacker heroism.

Take Teruo (YosiYosi Arakawa), a part-time tree surgeon with abominable taste in sweaters who, though nearly 30, still lives with his depressed father (Keizo Kanie) above the family’s second-hand bookstore, while dreaming of opening a house of horrors that will “literally scare people to death”. Or Teruo’s long-time friend Hisanobu (Okada), who manages his team of hospital cleaners with such absurd niceness that even he questions his own sincerity. Or Akari herself, a socially awkward, physically uncoordinated soul who is addicted equally to the sound of rain and the taste of fish paste sausages. Or Yuhara (Naoki Tanaka), a self-sufficient ceramics restorer whose outsider status is marked by the blotchy discolorations on his face.

There is in the film’s second half the skeletal outline of a love triangle, but really Fine, Totally Fine unfolds less as a coherent narrative than as an accumulating series of loose comic vignettes, giving its ensemble of marginalised misfits the space to enact all of life’s disappointment, despair and loneliness, before leading up to a gently spiritual conclusion in which love, or just a change of scene, seems able to restore even the most damaged of goods.

Fujita adopts a dry, observational style reminiscent of Jacques Tati or Roy Andersson, making the madcap incidents and whimsical idiosyncrasies in his sketches seem all the funnier for being kept at such a cool distance – even if, for all his deadpan humour, he approaches his characters with genuine affection. The result is an oddball delight.

Anton Bitel