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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
LITTLEROCK Littlerock is a little lyrical marvel. The story of two Japanese teenagers stranded in a god-forsaken backwater of the American West immediately seduces with its dusty landscape, at once beautiful and painfully boring. Atsuko, who doesn’t speak of word of English, and her brother, a tenuous translator, scan the wide expanses of land, searching for the America of the old Westerns their father used to show them. Instead of cowboys and Indians, they fall in with a posse of local youths, who fortify themselves against the mind-numbing isolation of their hometown with ample alcohol, pot, and palaver. Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka) is hip and beautiful, but it is her silence—she can neither speak nor understand English—that reduces her to an ultra feminine object of desire. Men gravitate to her with hungry grins, like little children to a puppy, and humorously try to navigate a language-free interaction with ample pointing and offering of drinks. Cory (Cory Zacharia), an awkward buffoon who fancies himself a model, latches onto the exotic arrivals right away, hoping to endear himself to Atsuko on a first-come, first-serve basis. Luckily for the language barrier, Atsuko can’t judge Cory—one of the more lovably ridiculous characters in recent memory—as harshly as the audience, and she develops an affection for her sweet, though lecherous, new friend. But in a perfectly simple and touching moment of lust at first sight, she sets her sights on another young man, and when it’s time for her and her brother to move on, Atsuko decides to stay a little longer in this most unlikely of towns. By staying, she flirts with the possibility of another life, an experiment as dramatic and unrealistic as a life-changing resolution made in a drunken stupor. Deaf to the uninspired conversation around her, Atsuko sees her surroundings as foreign and romantic—maybe in the same way everything looks better in black and white. Somehow, her social experiences fulfill her, and the added dimension of verbal interaction feels crude and unnecessary by contrast. The
music, a soft prairie-folk infusion, and lovingly-shot dust choked
landscapes, give the film a poetic, even surreal quality. But the
humor—sometimes cringe-worthy, other times delightful—is never far
behind. When Atusko and her brother finally leave, the real purpose of
the trip reveals itself, and the California town of Littlerock is left
behind as a dreamlike life-intermission. The result is a work that feels
contained and exhaustive, inspiring and diverting, and through and
through, a pleasure to watch.
Yana Litovsky
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