While Takashi Yamazaki may be guilty of manipulation in wringing out the nostalgia-induced sentimentality off his viewers' hearts and eyes, it's not like those potential tears are totally undeserved in the oh-so romantic rendering of a bygone Tokyo. "Always - Sunset on Third Street," adapted from Ryohei Saigan's manga, has all the adornment of schmaltz as it follows a number of the Tokyo working class in 1958 as, following the war and backdropped by a being rebuilt Tokyo Tower, they steadily struggle through their lives to a better future. Yamazaki, though, roots his film in an innocent glorification of the community striving for a common goal as seen through warm sepia tones and golden hues.
Among the multitude of the characters, Mutsuno Hoshino (Maki Horikita, who I just have to say remains as one of my favorite Japanese actors) is a recent junior high graduate who goes to Tokyo dreaming of a job at a prestigious automobile company only to find herself working as a repair woman in a car repair shop owned by Norifumi Suzuki (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi). Across the street is Ryunosuke Chagawa (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a candy shop owner struggling to make it as a serious novelist and makes up for his literary shortcomings by regularly submitting juvenile stories for a boys' magazine. Hiromi Ishizaki (Koyuki), a sake bar owner with a shady past, receives Junnosuke (Kenta Suka), a boy abandoned by his single mother, to be left in her care and, in turn, she leaves the boy to Ryunosuke.
Taking place in a broadly idealistic and exaggeratedly whimsical parallel reality, Yamazaki may often succumb to contrived melodramatic trappings and a few missed comedic notes, yet his relentlessly effervescent tale possesses absorbing set pieces and a contagious joie de vivre none so more affectingly displayed by the film's closing shot. An unabashedly giddy fairy tale, "Always" is an ode and a love letter to the city's halcyon days as shared by its inhabitants who are slowly rising from its past and, slowly but surely, to the age of TV, refrigerator, and Coca-Cola.
