What passes for countryside in Japan is often a vast sprawl of low-rise development: chain restaurants, big-box stores, gas stations and pachinko parlors. While there¡¯s no shortage of films that have tried to capture the ennui of life in such areas, the results are often as uninspiring as the locations they depict.
The title of ¡°It¡¯s Boring Here, Pick Me Up¡± says it all, really, but director Ryuichi Hiroki¡¯s portrait of provincial life is a more complex coming-of-age story than most.
Set over a 10-year period, it follows the fortunes of a group of graduating high school students in Toyama Prefecture as they make the awkward, often disappointing transition to adulthood. It¡¯s based on a collection of interlinked stories by Mariko Yamauchi, which Hiroki and screenwriter Tomonari Sakurai have arranged into a loose, nonlinear narrative that¡¯s constantly darting backward and forward in time, only gradually revealing how everything fits together.
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