Swing Girls review

Director Shinobu Yaguchi is not one to shy away from winning formulas. In the 90s he had a run of tough-luck films in which a chain of events ranging anywhere from unlikely to downright ridiculous would occur, sending the protagonist on some sort of comical adventure. Yaguchi quickly established he cares much more about the dialogue and individual jokes than the framework of the storyline itself. As a result, his films are usually summarized in half-paragraph blurbs that don’t quite do justice to just how funny his simplistic approach can be. Swing Girls is the perfect example of this. It follows the same formula that has been done repeatedly within the past few years both in Yaguchi’s own 2002 film Waterboys and Katsuhide Motoki’s 2003 film Drugstore Girl - that formula being a group of people joining a club for all the wrong reasons and then actually finding themselves compelled to succeed for different reasons altogether. It’s not quite as cliché as his former obsession with people finding suitcases full of ill-gotten money, but it’s getting there. Nevertheless, Swing Girls is a worthwhile comedy featuring a cast full of up-and-coming Japanese actors with seemingly flawless comedic timing and charm to spare.

The film takes place in rural Yamagata prefecture, in northern Japan. Thirteen girls are stuck in summer school for a make-up math class when one girl, Tomoko (Juri Ueno), peers out the window and notices the brass band leaving on their bus to perform at a baseball game. Soon after a catering truck arrives, having missed his opportunity to deliver the band’s bento boxes for the day. In a completely self-serving act of feigned kindness Tomoko asks their teacher Ozawa (Naoto Takenaka) if he will let them out of class so they can deliver the lunches to the game themselves. He eventually agrees and the girls hop on a train. Of course in all the commotion of doing this good deed they miss their stop and are forced to backtrack to the game on foot, taking their sweet time and accidentally dropping the lunches in some mud along the way. They haphazardly clean up at a nearby stream and continue on their way.

When the girls finally arrive at the game Nakamura (Yuta Hiraoka), makes them hand out the bento boxes. His own lunch is missing because the girls ate it on the train. Tomoko denies this, but Nakamura notices a single grain of rice on her face – a piece of damning evidence that will come back to haunt her later. Missing out on lunch works out in his favor, however, because all 42 members of the brass band come down with food poisoning and are sent to the hospital. Because Nakamura is the only healthy member of the band left, he’s expected to find replacement musicians to fill in temporarily. Unfortunately the only people that show up to audition are two punk rock girls with an electric bass and guitar and a shy girl with a recorder. Nakamura confronts Tomoko and tells her that if she and her classmates join the band he won’t tell anyone that they’re the ones that contaminated the lunches. She reluctantly agrees, but secretly she and the other girls only care about getting out of the make-up math class for the rest of the summer.

Nakamura decides on a big band style for the group, considering they have a string section and too few girls for a classical brass band. With that decision made they begin practicing and over the next several days the girls actually start to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately for them, however, the real brass band has recovered by this point and comes back in time to reclaim their instruments. The girls are secretly heartbroken by this development and after some prompting by Tomoko they decide they want to keep playing. A few hare-brained schemes later the girls manage to get their own instruments and form a band. Dubbing themselves the “Swing Girls and a Boy” they begin playing anywhere they can, culminating with an epic performance at the winter music festival.

As you can probably tell, Swing Girls isn’t exactly heavy on plot twists or anything particularly impactful for that matter. Thankfully, Yaguchi avoids all the expected teen film clichés like budding romance and overly dramatic moments between friends, choosing instead to lampoon these conventions with cleverly placed fake-outs. These unresolved subplots may frustrate some, but the overall result is a film that willingly shoves all sentimentality to the side for the sake of comedy and fun.

The main characters all fall into pretty standard archetypes but for the most part the actors playing them successfully add some of their own flair to the roles. Juri Ueno is particularly good as Tomoko, a role that requires someone with enough charm to stay likable while being totally selfish and obnoxious to everyone around her. In her fairly young career as an actress she’s already repeatedly established herself as the de facto alpha female in every project she’s involved in and I don’t expect that to stop any time soon. Shihori Kanjiya balances out that brashness by playing the boy-obsessed Saito with unapologetic enthusiasm even in the midst of repeatedly embarrassing herself. The actors spent months learning how to play their instruments and it really pays off in the realism of the performances. This may seem like an unnecessary chore given the ease of editing but I really believe the fact that you know they’re actually able to play the music for the film gives it added credibility and makes those scenes far more enjoyable to the viewer than faking it would have been.

Whether or not the plot or the concept of school girls playing big band jazz seems interesting isn’t really important when watching Swing Girls. This is a film that takes a very simple concept and lets it work at its own pace. There’s nothing particularly important riding on whether or not they succeed in the end, but that doesn’t make the journey any less fun.

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