“Wood Job!” : Back to Nature
“Wood Job” is a 2014 Japanese comedy-drama feature film written and directed by Shinobu Yaguchi and starring Shota Sometani, Masami Nagasawa and Hideaki Ito in the lead roles.
Shinobu Yaguchi known for his impeccable style of film making yet again brings us another film that imbues us to approbate nature through the adventurous journey of Yuki Hirano the protagonist of this movie.
The movie starts with the protagonist coming to the realization that he has failed his university entrance exam and now would have to wait till next year to reattempt the exam. But his time couldn't have been more saturnine because soon after that his girlfriend dumped him. Feeling torn asunder in his life he then goes out with his friends to a karaoke bar and gets drunk and sings his heart out. After partying when he is returning to his home he stumbles upon a promotional leaflet of a forestry training program having a photo of a beautiful girl on its cover page. With no intent of learning forestry, but to meet the attractive female on the promotional leaflet he heads to the village of Kamusari to take part in the forestry program.
After reaching there he soon realizes that the forestry training program wasn’t his cup of tea and most of the people who came there, like him had come because of the attractive female on the cover page and that too they get too know is not real and her photo was being used only for illustration purpose. But his worst time was yet to come when he meets the choleric, hard-working and dedicated lumberjack Yoki Lida who thinks Yuki was good for nothing and always used to deprecate him when he fails to do even simple tasks of a lumberjack. After sometime when Yuki gets fed up with all this one day he decides to quietly scurry from the training camp at night and he even succeeds in doing so but outside he crosses path with the same girl who was on the cover page of the promotional leaflet. Her name is Naoki Ishii. When Naoki catches Yuki fleeing she tells him that there are many posers like him who come just to see her but don’t even last for a week. She says to Yuki that he is not tough enough to complete the program and perhaps should return home.
To refute Naoki’s inference that he’s not tough enough to complete the program, Yuki stays the course. He’s then assigned to work at Yamamato Lumber, located up the mountain in the backwoods. Although not thrilled by the discovery that he’ll be working with, and staying at the home of, Yoki Lida, Yuki slowly starts to develop an approbation for the forest and the traditions of the village which also happened to be Naoki’s home. The villagers also start to grow a liking towards him and accept Yuki as one of their own whom they first found asinine and now he is singing with them, he is playing with the village kids along with Naoki. He also finds an elder brotherly love in the curt scoldings of Yoki.
The villagers and forestry workers pray to the forest and considered it as a living being and also offer it food and drinks in the anticipation that the forest would help and look after them. Yuki’s training program comes to an end with the Onbashira Festival, a dangerous festival involving riding huge logs down a hill that is held to promote fertility of the forest. Since Yuki now has grown a liking towards the village he doesn’t feel like going back to the city even the villagers don’t want him to go. Even Noaki who initially used to find Yuki incompetent had also grown a liking towards Yuki and doesn’t want him to leave. When Yuki returns to city life he feels an emptiness within him and also misses the smell of timber. The film ends with Yuki returning to Kamusari.
This back-to-nature coming-of-age tale has a story arc that's fairly predictable — all the more so if you're acquainted with writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi's reputation as a feel-good, zero-to-hero film specialist. Even so, it's hard to resist the movie's considerable charm, much of which stems from its agreeable portrayal of a bucolic Japan seldom shown in the films of a country with an overwhelmingly urban population and whose timber industry is in atrophy. The theme of the city folk visiting a small town and coming to grips with the quirky locals is common in Japanese film, but this is one that does it particularly well. A city guy goes to the country to meet a girl he saw in a brochure. Along the way, he begins to get respect for the quirky locals, and their odd habits, who he begins to realize while working with the forest, is also one with it.
I came to know of this movie through my Japanese professor and damn this is such a relaxing movie and didn’t expect I would enjoy this. Even though at times this movie made me sleepy but I just couldn’t take my eyes off the screen because the characters are just interesting and the visuals are enticing. The film should get its comeuppance for its astounding cinematography, soothing guitar music, and well-acted characters.
