MOVIE REVIEW : Sentimental ‘School’ Still Makes Its Mark

“The School” (Little Tokyo Cinema 1) is 30 minutes too long and too sentimental by half, but it still hits home with its universal theme of the loss of community in the face of the relentless impersonality and competitiveness of modern urban life.

It is set on Tsukudajima, an island in Tokyo Bay where a shabby junior high is about to succumb to developers. Stung by an elderly man’s question, “Since when do schools teach only what’s written in the texts?,” the conscientious Nakajima (Tsunehiko Watase) decides to organize a kind of free school for the junior high’s students, many of whom lack the incentive or the skills to continue on to high school.

The youngsters are as initially perplexed as Nakajima and his colleagues are as to how to go about setting up a curriculum; so much freedom is dizzying for one and all. The thought that learning might conceivably be a pleasure rather than merely a rote exercise is downright shocking. These are people, young and older alike, accustomed to conforming without thinking about what they want out of life. In depicting how these people go about finding their way through their confused and uncertain state, director Shingo Yamashiro and writer Takako Shigemori are on such solid ground that it’s too bad that, apparently for commercial appeal, they feel the need to take off on many digressive slapstick antics. They end up in all-stops-out heart-tugging as the kids and their teachers organize a community religious festival in honor of a pupil’s dying father.

On the plus side is the film’s large, likable cast and, above all, its setting. It doesn’t seem possible that such an irresistibly quaint, ancient riverside village could exist in the shadow of the vast and towering Tokyo skyline. But then that’s the point: Tsukudajima already has sufficient high-rises of its own to suggest that an elderly cafe owner is sadly on the mark when she says, “In two years this will look like Manhattan.”