The film is set in Hokkaido, the most northern part of Japan. Four people, all different characters with different backgrounds, bump into each other one after the other and together set their journey to nowhere. Eventually they come to the conclusion, that home is where they'd like to be, even if that's where they were running away from.
This is practically a road movie, only with a very slow pace, almost creeping. The mood is very quiet and most of the time there is no dialogue at all. The director (who was present at the screening) explained that many elements (like the empty baby carriage, the missing tracks, the empty tank, the "tombstone" in the hotel,...) had the purpose of creating a mood of despair and above all loneliness.
The key scene is the ending, in which Nakamura, the oldest of the four,comes to his hometown, where he had been heading to all along (in fact, he was the only one who had a definite goal), and finds it desolate and abandoned, leaving him nowhere to go... and everywhere.
Altogether it's a nice movie with a couple of laughs (great scene in which Nakamura tries to stop a cop from committing suicide).
This is practically a road movie, only with a very slow pace, almost creeping. The mood is very quiet and most of the time there is no dialogue at all. The director (who was present at the screening) explained that many elements (like the empty baby carriage, the missing tracks, the empty tank, the "tombstone" in the hotel,...) had the purpose of creating a mood of despair and above all loneliness.
The key scene is the ending, in which Nakamura, the oldest of the four,comes to his hometown, where he had been heading to all along (in fact, he was the only one who had a definite goal), and finds it desolate and abandoned, leaving him nowhere to go... and everywhere.
Altogether it's a nice movie with a couple of laughs (great scene in which Nakamura tries to stop a cop from committing suicide).