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FORTUNE FAVORS LADY NIKUKO
Director: Ayumu Watanabe Cast: The voices of Shinobu Otake, Cocomi, Natsuki Hanae, Ikuji Nakamura, Izumi Ishii MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:37 Release Date: 6/3/22 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022 The mother is a big ball of childish energy, and the daughter is a stick of a mopey pre-teen. Something isn't quite right in Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, which is mostly an amusing little slice of life about the joys and troubles of growing up, in the case of the girl, and of never having grown up, in the case of the mother. Eventually, director Ayumu Watanabe's animated adaptation of Kanako Nishi's novel tries to be about something deeper than those simple goals, but in its haste to get there, the movie ultimately falls into some distracting melodrama. Mostly, though, Satomi Oshima's screenplay follows Nikuko (voice of Shinobu Otake), who is overweight, enjoys food and puns, and has an unfortunate track record of dating men who take advantage of her naïveté and money. At some point while moving from place to place in the fallout of those disastrous romances, Nikuko became the mother of Kikuko (voice of Cocomi). The two now live in a houseboat in a small port town, where Nikuko works as a server at a grill and Kikuko attends school. Everything in this place is calm and relaxed, and there's a real sense of that in both the plot, which is almost non-existent apart from some interpersonal dramas, and the bright, colorful backdrops. Oshima and Watanabe just revel in Nikuko's seemingly endless energy, as she jokes and eats and slides to meet her favorite penguin at a local aquarium. Meanwhile, the filmmakers also commiserate with Kikuko's pre-adolescent uncertainties—about friendships, her feelings for a secretly odd boy named Ninomiya (voice of Natsuki Hanae), her own sense of feeling like a weirdo (She imagines that animals talk around and to her), and how different she is in appearance and personality from her mother. The story never quite comes together into a clear through line, but to be fair, Watanabe's approach to and attitude about putting these characters over any kind of plotting are clear from the beginning. The only conflicts that matter to Kikuko are ones like a debate about a daily basketball game at school, with her best friend Maria (voice of Izumi Ishii) wanting a bit more democracy in the process, and a bit of embarrassment about her mother's lack of self-awareness or social mores. A little of such matters go a long way, especially when it comes to the movie's treatment of Nikuko as a bit too much of a joke and not enough as the complex character the last act asserts her to be. As for that last act of Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, it hammers home the answers to a couple of questions and mysteries from the past, with a lot of exposition presented more in the mode of a soap opera. While the revelations also solidify the depth of this mother-daughter relationship, they come at the sacrifice of the movie's tone and its overall feeling of in-the-moment ordinariness. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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