The Cinematheque

“A great film … Iwai’s films are unabashedly populist, [but] this is not to say they’re simplistic … The sitcom-ish hijinks of Hana & Alice unfold against a backdrop of less idyllic realities that only become clear as the film progresses.”

Allison Willmore, The Independent Eye

The complications of Iwai Shunji’s modern melodramas always start with small acts of invention: letters, web posts, and romanticized white lies. Picking an improvised crush out of a morning commuter-train crowd, Alice (Aoi Yu) and Hana (Anne Suzuki) unintentionally threaten their close friendship by suggesting what it might be like for a man to enter their lives. Hana takes the prompt seriously, telling fellow student Masashi that he is suffering from amnesia—and is in love with her. As in a silent film comedy, the story is implanted, takes root, and grows into a domino effect of additional lies, card tricks, comical confusions, and, in Iwai’s unique touch, tangential plotlines of beauty and heartbreak. It’s a mark of the director’s curiosity that he devotes as much time to the central plot as he does ballet rehearsals and moments of parental estrangement. Hana & Alice would be the final collaboration between Iwai and Shinoda Noboru before the cinematographer’s untimely death.

In Japanese with English subtitles

DCP courtesy of Rockwell Eyes

“Unlike Lily Chou-Chou, here Iwai views his cast from an adult perspective, seeing the humour and the heartbreak simultaneously.”

Grady Hendrix, Film Comment