I was fortunate enough to attend the International Premiere of "Life Can Be So Wonderful" at the Miami Film Festival this year. At the premiere Director Osamu Minorikawa presented a question and answer session after the movie to explain his creative process behind the film. He described his movie as turning pages through the lives of five wandering Japanese people. It is perhaps better to address this movie as five different movies, presented in a way that was incredibly different and fresh to me--movie poetry. Each of the five movie poems followed the mundane life of a person living in Japan. The first, a nude model, is a woman who is tangled in the beauty of modeling for art, its connotations, and her desire to be a muse of art. The poem incorporated a weave of images that captured different visual aspects of her story--interview-like images of the woman talking on a couch, lush plants outside the subway station that she passed everyday, and other flashes of scenes that portrayed her thoughts. While there was an absence of plot throughout the majority of the poems, which I can only guess will irk many of those who do not appreciate the essence of poetry, the movie served a different purpose: catering to the visual and auditory senses, Osamu Minorikawa accomplished with film what Ezra Pound managed to do through words. Many of the images will remain to haunt me, others were completely temporary, but it was the sensitivity of the film that really carried it to a different level. While many will disagree with its slow unraveling beauty in a culture of instant gratification and reason, personally, I found this film to be a breath of fresh air and an astounding journey. Not eligible to be branched in the category of Academy Award dramas, the film is of a different genre. The only way to describe the five movie poems of "Life Can Be So Wonderful" would be to compare it to watching the beauty of waves on a beach-- it enables you to see the wonder in life.
