Sawako Decides Review

Remaining stoic in the face of social, industrial and emotional humiliation, Hikari Mitsushima makes a splendidly unconventional heroine as she returns to the sticks from an unfulfilling sojourn in Tokyo to take over her father’s ailing business. Forced to deal with a sceptical workforce, treacherous boyfriend Masashi Endô and his daughter, Mitsushima begins her transformation by radically altering the lyrics of the factory song. Alongside such hilarious set-pieces, Yuya Ishii satirises the politics of class, gender and age in this Japanese variation on a deadpan Kaurismäki comedy of inconsequence that is slyly amusing and sobering in its assumption that folks are best off settling for what they have because, invariably, they deserve nothing better.