When the student is ready, the teacher appears. A Kawai comedy about a punk who is forced to spend a year in a Buddhist monastery. As a result, it turns out that Zen can be cool, and Buddhist monks are popular among girls no less than rockers and fashionable gourmets.
Technically, the film is perfect. The director fanatically reproduces the style of late Ozu, in some scenes, the similarity is simply manic (that is, the symmetry of the frame, shooting from a low level and the general sweetness just go off scale). But compared to the debut tape - experimental, cheap, but still very curious, this film - competent, verified and beautiful, but in the end only a stylistic parody.
The director will reshoot a similar plot in the next film about sumo, which will repeat literally everything: from the cast to humor and final morality, only Zen meditations there will be replaced by training half-naked woe-sumoists. And in fact, this is not so much some kind of directorial feature, but rather a characteristic feature of Japanese cinema - the concentration of the entire film on a certain sport, hobby, profession. The focus is almost always on a narrow area. You can recall a number of films about synchronized swimming, ballroom dancing, hockey, knitting, hairdressers, etc.
7 out of 10