Brand New Landscape

Adult siblings Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) and Emi (Mai Kiryu) have recovered, more or less, from the family tragedy that marked their childhood: Ren now drifts through life as a flower deliveryman, and Emi is engaged, though she privately doubts her suitability for long-term commitment. Their fragile equilibrium is shaken when they reunite with their father, Hajimi (Kenichi Endo), a starchitect who has taken control of a controversial new urban-redevelopment project in Shibuya that will displace the neighborhood’s unhoused population. As in their childhood, when he left the family after their mother’s sudden death, Hajimi is willing to take a bulldozer to the past to make room for the future. In his debut feature, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, writer-director Yuiga Danzuka (son of renowned earthscape designer Eiki Danzuka, whose Miyashita Park stands in for Hajimi’s project in the film) casts a calm gaze over Tokyo’s “brand-new landscape” of modern architecture—and over the architecture of modernity and its discontents. Opening with a shot of a fast-food family meal, the film picks up where Edward Yang left off in Yi Yi, taking a domestic drama and seeding it with an ambitious commentary on how the structure of capitalism shapes and distorts our most intimate relationships. A CineCina release.