My Secret Cache (Himitsu no Hanazono) review

In a drastic departure from the darker-than-dark comedy of “Down the Drain”, director Shinobu Yaguchi took his follow-up, My Secret Cache, in a decidedly lighter direction. While definitely not his most polished film to date, it still had all the quirky charm and fun little moments of absurdity we’ve come to expect from his movies since. It’s also probably the most straight-forward attempt at a goofy slapstick comedy he’s ever made, without so much as a hint of unnecessary drama or sentimentality.

In the movie, Naomi Nishida plays a scowl-faced slacker named Sakiko Suzuki. As far back as she can remember she’s been obsessed with money. In fact the only time she ever smiles is when she’s thinking about cash. When she was a kid she’d bore her friends by showing off her savings account statistics, and when she got older she’d offend boyfriends by asking for the potential cost of dates upfront in lieu of actually going on them. Her obsession is so obvious to everyone around her that one day while nagging her to get a job, her mother suggests that she find work as a bank teller if she likes money so much. The family has a good laugh at that, but 3 seconds later we see Sakiko acing her bank teller interview by listing “counting money” as her favorite hobby.

Six months later, counting other people’s money loses all its luster for Sakiko as it dawns on her that it’s just not the same when she can’t have any of it. However, the monotony is broken up when she’s taken as a hostage during a bank robbery and thrown in the trunk of the robbers’ car along with 500,000,000 yen. When they take a wrong turn along the way the car ends up rolling down a hill and exploding. And as evidence of just how goofy this movie is willing to get, we’re presented with a few abruptly-edited “action” scenes involving dummy and toy doll versions of Sakiko being thrown off a cliff, sent down raging rapids, over a waterfall, and into a watery grotto before returning to a close-in camera shot.

Sakiko ends up surviving the ordeal, but eventually remembers that the money is still back at the bottom of that grotto. When she’s almost killed in an attempt to get back there, it becomes clear that she can’t manage such a dangerous voyage without a certain set of skills. And being as money-obsessed as she is, nothing is going to stop her from accomplishing her goal. From this point on her former lazy slackerism transitions into a personality of dogged determination as she pulls out all the stops to prepare herself to get that cash.

Throughout the rest of the movie Sakiko’s mind-boggling resolve never wavers as the skills she needs to learn and the money she needs to spend to learn them keep snowballing.  Geology, swimming, diving, and rock-climbing are just a few of the things she aces; all in the name of greed. But she isn’t the only one driven to self-improvement via a less-than-honorable motivation. When the ex-girlfriend of Edogawa, the assistant professor in Sakiko’s Geology class, sees her former boyfriend spending a bit too much time with Sakiko, she becomes fiercely jealous and ends up stalking her new (not to mention oblivious) rival at every turn in an attempt to sabotage her life. However, along the way she inadvertently picks up one of Sakiko’s “hobbies” and ends up taking it to an unexpected-but-amusing extreme.

If there’s one central theme that ties most of Yaguchi’s movies together, it’s the notion that good things can come from bad. It doesn’t really matter if an initially sketchy motivation leads you to bigger and better things in life; the important thing is that you get there. For a while it seems as though Sakiko may be missing this point altogether, but a simple scene in the latter part of the movie ties it all together and shows that even someone as single-minded as her can see the bigger picture.

It’s difficult to adequately explain all the elements that makes this movie funny. Obviously there’s a lot of slapstick physical comedy, but there are also a ton of smaller, seemingly insignificant details that put it over the top; such as the rubber-faced scowls of Sakiko and her younger sister Mika, dramatic pauses held just a few awkward ticks too long, and flamboyant shots that make the camera itself a source of comedy. Those tuned in to the comically mundane should really get a kick out of these minor, but effective bits. Everyone else should still find a lot to like about this movie too, because it’s chock full of charmingly mean-spirited fun.

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Availability: Geneon USA released “My Secret Cache” on region 1 DVD with English subtitles on August 8, 2006. Picture quality seems to have been brightened up compared to past transfers, but there aren’t any features aside from a teaser and a few trailers for other Geneon releases. For full specs, see this link.

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