THIRD TIME LUCKY

Finding Connections… and Breaking Them

Venue(s): Cinema Jack & Betty
Until June 10 (Fri), 2022
Language: In Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: sandome.brighthorse-film.com/
Theater website: www.jackandbetty.net/cinema/detail/2863/
Theater website: www.jackandbetty.net/access.html
Trailer: https://youtu.be/b1yk4Q_odUE
Tariff: General: ￥1,800, University/high school students: ￥1,500, Senior: ￥1,100, Member: ￥1,500 or ¥1,200
Advance tickets: https://jackandbetty.cineticket.jp/theater/yokohama/schedule#20220402

Title: 三度目の、正直 (Sandome no Shojiki)
Director: Tadashi Nohara (野原位)
Duration: 115 min

Tadashi Nohara’s snapshot of contemporary Japanese life, Third Time Lucky, is playing in Yokohama with English subtitles. The film, which world premiered in Competition at the 2021 Tokyo International Film Festival, marks the veteran writer’s directorial debut.

Nohara is best known for his work as cowriter on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy and, more importantly, cowriter and producer on Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Happy Hour, a 5-hour exploration of female friendship.

Third Time Lucky conveys a similar sense of people who aren’t able to connect, even with members of their own families. Focusing on unfulfilled relationships and dead-end lives among a group of interrelated, midlife friends and family members, it quietly observes them as they fall in and out of love, forging new (probably temporary) affiliations.

Like Happy Hour, Nohara’s film is set in Kobe, where divorcée Haru (Rira Kawamura, who was in Happy Hour and cowrote the script for Third Time Lucky with Nohara) is living with a divorced doctor whose own daughter has recently moved to Canada to attend college. Haru splits from the doctor after he confesses to an affair, and almost immediately discovers an amnesiac young man whom she promptly adopts and calls Naruto, the name of her unborn child almost 10 years earlier.

The adoption is disturbing for Haru’s mother, brother Takeshi, an aspiring rapper, and his psychologically unstable wife Mikako, and interrelationships grow even more complicated.

Jack & Betty Cinemas