Humility. Yoshioka, a young teacher, arrives on a sparsely populated Japanese island to work for a school. However, it turns out that he is mute. Once he was a champion in kendo, but in one of the fights he received a blow to the vocal cords and thus lost his voice. Despite this illness, he actively undertakes to teach schoolchildren. Not everyone really likes him about it. Some education officials believe that such a person cannot teach. And then it turns out that the island will host the next Kendo Championship, and Yoshioka will be able to represent the island. The attitude towards him is changing. But the fate of his teaching is still unclear.
The image of Yoshioka embodies the idea of Christian humility. Although he was a champion and certainly knows how to stand up for himself (not for nothing students for physical strength called him “locomotive”), on the island he willingly endures mockery and even beatings. And there is no dignity in this, the teacher is just pity. This man, of course, has some truth of his own, but to the viewer it remains inaccessible. We just have to guess. Most likely, Yoshioka had some serious experience in the past that made him radically reevaluate his life. Therefore, now the external world, its problems and conventions are perceived by him as something insignificant. But that doesn’t stop him from loving his job and his kids. Yoshioka is a positive person in every sense. But his image is shrouded in mystery, which is never revealed. Or maybe there is no mystery, and Yoshioka is just a man on his mind, a strange young man who does not know how to fit into the standards of the modern world.
But it is impossible not to admit that Sensei Lokomotiv did not escape the standard Japanese melodramatism, which, of course, is somewhat tiresome. Yoshioka’s love for students seems a little exaggerated. And the situation itself - the silent teacher and his adoring students - is already built so that it can be added to an increased amount of sweetness and sweetness. This film, of course, is not so hopeless, given that it managed to preserve “still dimensionality”, without falling into “already tight”, but it still does not leave the limits of the somewhat primitive paradigm of Japanese melodrama.
7 out of 10