REVIEW: SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF AT BIFF 2017

Japanese Films Dominate in Korea

Busan Interview: Ryutaro Ninomiya on Sweating the Small Stuff
Official website: goo.gl/i7TSVE

Shiyo-massetsu (枝葉末節) is a Japanese idiom that indicates something unessential, just trivial details. The expression comes from the example of a tree: leaves and branches are insignificant, compared to the big trunk. Inspired by this saying, Ryutaro Ninomiya titled his second feature Sweating the Small Stuff.

The film, which he both wrote and directed, gently depicts the mundane life of a taciturn blue-collar worker, someone who is seemingly insignificant to objective eyes. However, this Locarno favorite proves that, through Ninomiya’s directorial skill and powerful performance — he plays the worker — the day-to-day occurrences of a lower-class protagonist can generate something universally appealing, a tiny flower that blooms on a decaying tree.

As the filmmaker admits, “regret” is the whole theme of this powerfully engaging character study. The protagonist, also called Ryutaro Ninomiya, is a 27-year-old automobile repair shop worker, a reticent man who never allows emotion to move his stone face. His dreary routine of working and drinking is disrupted when a phone call arrives from his childhood friend Yusuke, who informs him that Ryuko, Yusuke’s mother, is dying. Regretting not having visited his surrogate mother for years, Ryutaro decides to make a visit.

Sweating the Small Stuff director Ryutaro Ninomiya at BIFF.
©Kenta Kato

“I decided from the beginning that I should play myself, and that my father should play himself,” said Ninomiya in an interview during BIFF, where his film was screening. Although there are some exaggerations for dramatic purposes, the main narrative is “based on my own story with a childhood friend and his mother.”

As reflected in the protagonist’s character of the film, the director lost his mother at a very young age and grew up with his father only. Whenever things did not work out in the single-parent family, Ninomiya received tremendous support from his friend’s mother. Therefore, Ryuko in the film is a surrogate mother for the filmmaker and Sweating the Small Stuff is dedicated to her. “On her deathbed, Auntie gave me some money to support my filmmaking. I wondered what kind of film I should make with this money, but I realized that the film about her would be the most appropriate.”

A scene with Ninomiya (foreground) and "friends" who always expect him to pick up the tab.

Unlike the silent, tough, but emotionally naïve Ryutaro on screen, the filmmaker turns out to be a more charming, amiable fellow. Answering a question about how close the screen version is to his personal character, Ninomiya laughed and said, “I get like that when I’m drunk.”

Although death overshadows every movement of the protagonist, the director carefully avoids directly depicting it, only presenting the four-day ritual of Ryutaro’s visits to Ryuko. A number of sequences in which the protagonist faces the dying Ryuko are only presented through the banal dialogue of what they’re eating and how they are doing, as if the film itself is an obligatory ordeal of the protagonist to accept death as an unavoidable occurrence in life. The filmmaker says, “My mother passed away when I was six. I woke up in the morning, and she was dead. That was quite a shock for a first-grader. That might have affected my view on death.”

Stylistically, Ninomiya seems to have established a distinctive style as a filmmaker in just two features, utilizing a handheld camera only and staging many scenes in one long take, reminiscent of such renowned auteurs as Hong Song-soo. According to the director, this choice is simply because “I just don’t like cutting. I want to depict people as they are.” Ninomiya, the director, screenwriter, editor and star of own film, comes across as the kind of person who can sense what is best for the film even without knowing why it is the best.

Ryutaro Ninomiya and his father.

Like many other filmmakers in the world, Ninomiya is a huge cinephile, a big fan of Mikio Naruse films, especially Floating Clouds. However, he did not consciously quote any particular film in directing Sweating the Small Stuff. Rather, the film is more of “an assembly of everything that I have watched in my life.”

Owing to the very positive reception of the film at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, where Ninomiya had his world premiere screening, the future of this unique filmmaker seems to be brighter than ever. However, Ninomiya’s wish is as simple as the small, lovely indie film that he directed: “I just want to keep making films. It took five years to make this one, and it was mentally unbearable.”

By Kenta Kato

Kenta Kato is a Tokyo-based writer, film critic and festival programmer, currently working on a PhD degree in Film at Waseda University.