Shin Adachi’s fourth film might not escape comparisons with Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), yet he does succeed in offering the spectator a completely different narrative, different in tone and thematically. Adachi utilizes a similar narrative frame as Linklater’s beloved romance drama not to stage a bittersweet and offbeat romantic fantasy for the spectator to indulge in but to explore the struggles many contemporary subjects have with the fickly little thing called desire. In this sense, Adachi delivers an anti-romance that highlights the impossibility to write the sexual relationship.

Good Luck centres on Taro Yoshiyama (Hiroki Sano), an indie filmmaker who has been awarded an honourable mention for his short documentary film at a Film festival at the Bluebird mini-theatre in Beppu. While he has little desire to attend the festival, Yuki (Saki Kato), his girlfriend and financial sponsor, succeeds in convincing him to attend. Not long after been destroyed on the stage by the presenter and organizer of the festival (Yuka Itaya), he meets the bubbly drifter Miki Sunahara (Hana Amano).

Adachi’s narrative introduces Taro Yoshiyama as someone who is unable to assume a desiring position. The short film he crafted is thus not, as the spectator might easily assume, a project born from passion and creativity, but a product of Yuki’s financial support – Taro’s film is a loveless gift that merely aims to ensure the monetary flow. With his film, he does not attempt to arouse the Other’s love, but to offer a mendacious answer to silence the Other’s desire and support his unvocalized demand for money. 

Taro’s short-documentary is extremely revelatory because it redoubles the relational dynamic between Taro and Yuki within a fictional frame. In his film, Taro exploits Yuki as a support to put himself, albeit indirectly, on the stage – the documentary is, when all is said and one, about him.

Yet, one should not make the mistake to categorize Taro’s film as a mere narcissistic exercise, but read it as a minimal questioning of her desire for him. In the concatenation of fragments, he attempts, in different ways, to persuade Yuki to give him the answer to what she desires in him, yet to no avail. He smacks into the opaqueness of her desire and into the riddle of his own desirability. Moreover, Yuki ultimately confronts him – Why do you want to make films? – with the question of what fuels his filmic exercise.

It seems, at first glance, that Taro wants to utilize the Other’s desire to dissipate the confusion surrounding his own desire. In this sense, the various versions of the question ‘What do you, as Other, desire (in me)’ he directs at Yuki aim to uncover enough coordinates to allow him to calculate what to desire in the Other.          

The inability to accede to a desiring position is echoed in his directionless wandering. Taro does not sightsee because he wants to, but because he needs to (heed his girlfriend’s demand). Yet, what does he aim to gain by fulfilling her demand? Some will argue that he hysterically abides by her law to coincide with the ideal she wants him to realize for her, yet the lack of desire by which he answers her demand makes this interpretation untenable. The lack of desire that echoes within his wandering underlines, first and foremost, that Taro does not desire Yuki and, thus, has little interest in the ideal she reflects to him. The only reason why he abides by her demand to sight-see is, in our view, to eradicate the echo of her desire in her spoken and written signifiers.

The attentive spectator might realize that Taro shows two seemingly contradictory faces. Within the fragments of his short documentary film, we perceive a Taro who tries to find a way to desire, to accede to a desiring position, and in Beppu we are confronted with a Taro who avoids the dimension of desire – the Other’s as well as his own.

The contrast between these two faces invites the spectator to consider the many hesitations in his speech and the refusals he vocalizes within his short documentary film as signs that his search for his own desire is not genuine – it is an attempt that he does not want to genuinely pursue. One is, thus, led to assume that he fears desire and that this unconscious fear dictates his presence – his speech and his acts – within the societal field.     

The problem of desire is also sensible in the dynamic between Miki and Taro. While Miki signals the presence of desire through her repeated demands – Why don’t we go together? – Taro reveals his lack of interest in the Other’s and his own desire by not refusing her (Narra-note 1). Yet, the barrage of questions Miki fires at him succeed in destabilizing Taro – he stutters, he hesitates – because she aims with her questions at nothing other than his desire. She cheekily penetrates, time and time again, his defence mechanism of agreeing, his vocal wall to keep the dimension of desire at bay. These unexpected perforations might allow Taro to exploit the cracks in his aloof defence to address his subject, the inhibited state of his desire, to an Other (Narra-note 2). Yet, whether he will be able to accede to a desiring position or not is an all together different question.

The composition of Good Luck offers a nice balanced mix of different shots. While Adachi interweaves a few static shots into his composition, he brings his anti-romance narrative mainly to life with a mix of shaky and fluid dynamic shots. It is evident from Adachi’s composition that he utilizes dynamism within his visual fabric to reverberate and amplify the naturalness of the interactional flow and the performances that animate the speech-interactions. What also helps to give the narrative its naturalistic atmosphere is the somewhat darkish lightning-design.

Yet, like any film that seeks to utilize its compositional tools to create a sense of naturalism, the effect of the composition on the spectator ultimately depends on the performances – one cannot magically elevate the acting performances with a mere shaky frame. Luckily, Adachi can rely on two very talented actors, Hiroki Sano and Hana Amano, to bring his drama of misunderstanding to life. Sano and Amano, by infusing the necessary touch of believability within their characters and their interactions, ensure that Adachi can develop his themes – desire as an inter-subjective problem and as cause of misunderstanding between men and women, in a manner that does not fail to touch the spectator  

With Good Luck, Shin Adachi delivers an ironic spin on Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995). Rather than satisfying the spectator with a bittersweet narrative that supports the fantasy of a sexual relationship that can be written, he utilizes the dynamic of the encounter to examine the problem of desiring within the societal field and the way desire give rise to misunderstanding between subjects. In short, highly recommended.

Notes

Narra-note 1: While Miki’s comportment and speech signals the presence of desire – the desire to (search for a) desire, the dimension of desire as it unfolds in human relationships is highly problematic for her. As she tells Taro and the spectator, she struggles to endure the continued presence of the Other around her, the Otherness of the other’s desire.

Taro seems, at least at first glance, good company. Not only will their encounter be fleeting, but Taro struggles to realize himself as desiring subject in her presence – he merely signals his subjective emptiness.  

As the narrative unfolds, the spectator ultimately realize that Miki’s relational problems are caused by her inability to realize the seductive nature of her own presence, to discern how she, with her bubbly presence, arouses the Other’s desire, the desire whose presence she cannot bear. Taro can only fall into a trap; he is unable to resist the seductive image she projects to him, yet become radically deaf to her subjective signifiers.     

Narra-note 2: Taro’s dream, which doubles as a surprising meta-film moment, confronts him with his desire in a phantasmatic manner. The desire featured within the dream, the desire that Taro refuses to fully acknowledge, is his desire for another woman.