About The Pink Sky | Review

Raised On Stolen Hope, Borrowed Cash, and Mistaken Relationships

Keiichi Kobayashi’s Tokyo International Film Festival winning feature debut, see the helmer pull triple duty on the picture, writing, directing, and shooting all himself. About A Pink Sky follows Izumi (Ai Ikeda), a stubborn teenage girl, who finds a wallet containing 300,000 yen on the sidewalk, but after mulling over the thought of turning it over to police or returning it to its rightful owner, she lends most of the cash to a struggling neighbor. In the wake of the indecent, every one of her relationships becomes an emotional tug of war, but we find Izumi knows when to swallow her pride to reestablish peace every so often. Her gradual coming of age is gracefully captured in a striking black and white palette, and an ever changing depth of field that perfectly reflects the soul searching Kobayashi’s lead must endure.

Flaunting the remainder of her findings, Izumi loses the wallet to her friends, who return it back to its owner hoping to score a date as bounty, but they are unaware that 200,000 yen is missing and an IOU note lies in its place. The boy, Sato (Tsubasa Takayama), quickly realizes that Izumi has duped her friends, but upon confronting her, he finds she also knows that his cash was stolen from his wealthy father. They come to an odd agreement, deciding to cooperate on a fake newspaper containing only good news for his sick friend in the hospital, but what at first seems like a flirtatious business venture quickly becomes a trail of dishonesty and betrayal for the sake of covert love. As secrets are revealed, Izumi finds herself looking within, hoping to redeem herself for past misgivings.

Kobayashi’s nonchalant writing and deft direction of his first time actors make About A Pink Sky a solid debut, but the intimacy and inner conflict he creates with a shallow focus field and hand held cinematography brings the picture up a notch. Through teenage reckless abandon and a world stripped of both visual and aural extraneous noise, Kobayashi is able to remove the social shields of youth to unveil one of humanity’s greatest gifts, compassion and understanding that beams through the awkward fog of aged humor. After refusing to settle for less, his young characters find themselves humbled by the world they thought they were familiar with, even if only temporarily.

Reviewed on January 21 at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival – World Dramatic Comp Programme.
113 Mins.