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Shinji Sōmai began his directorial career with hits that fell into the category of idol films. These were projects that were made primarily for the purpose of presenting young celebrities with the aim of infatuating the audience and helping to establish the given idol as a multi-talented performer who would not only appear on camera, but also sing a single on the film’s soundtrack and have her face adorn all promotional materials. Within its category, Tokyo Heaven is a surprisingly self-reflective work whose narrative directly thematises the calculated and prefabricated nature of the idols and their absolute detachment from real life. The main protagonist is the 16-year-old celebrity Yuu, who is on the verge of a great career but dies on the eve of the launch of a major media campaign. In the afterlife, she gets a chance to again walk among the living. She gets around the condition that she cannot return in her own form by requesting the face from a billboard with a publicised version of herself. Coincidentally, she ends up in the apartment of a rank-and-file employee of a PR agency, the solitary Fumio. But the afterlife has a few more rules that Yuu can’t circumvent. Besides not appearing in mirrors and photographs, she mustn’t come into contact with anyone who knows her or knows that she’s dead. The film abounds with a full range of playful and imaginative elements that are variously based on these rules. In terms of execution, the most rewarding of these is the character of Yuu’s guide, the dopey “Cricket”, who takes on the form of the last person Yuu thought of before she died, who happens to be her sleazy, perverted boss. Unlike other films with a similar premise, Tokyo Heaven’s narrative doesn’t revolve around the protagonist trying to right the wrongs of her life or seeking revenge for her death. On the contrary, the ambiguity of her new beginning is variously thematised, placing on the girl the burden of her severed ties with the past, but also the pleasure of an ordinary life and growing up that she did not have in her career as a star. In addition to the straightforward dramatic situations, Shinji Sōmai also expresses these central motifs in several of his typical passages, where hyperrealism is intertwined with metaphors and symbols, which are the highlights of the film (the playground scene after the passage involving the secret visit to her parents’ home, the brilliant one-shot capture of a shadow, and the magnificent sequence with the birthday bouquet). Though Tokyo Heaven is primarily a coming-of-age story about a protagonist who gets a chance to experience life at least for a moment, it doesn’t limit itself to being a run-of-the-mill celebration of fleeting beauty. It presents influencing someone else’s life as the fulfilment of life. That someone else is Fumio, who personifies a typical employee of the given era. The Japanese economy was in the final stage of its boom, or rather its artificially inflated bubble. It burst a year after the film’s release, which brought not only the economy to its knees, but also the system of stable jobs and the existential security of the middle and upper classes. The film was thus actually very prophetic in its message that one should overcome the burden and fear of stepping off of one’s predefined life path and instead redefine oneself according to one’s own personality. Tokyo Heaven is a rather forgotten and obscure title in Sōmai’s filmography. Of course, it offers the pleasure of the director’s typical trademarks, particularly his ingenious one-shot scenes and dolly shots. But it is also surprising as a reminiscence of Sōmai’s creatively wild beginnings and coming-of-age movies. Despite its numerous bizarre fantasy elements, however, Tokyo Heaven remains at its core a melancholic story of two souls who meet and mirror each other and grow close, though not in the usual romantic sense, but in the existential sense. (17.07.2022) (weniger) (mehr)