The Truth About Hana & Alice

Sometimes you watch a movie and not all of it sticks with you but just a few precious things do. Small flourishes that show you that they were really on while making it. Those are the real markings of an auteur. Something I think about all the time is in the movie “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer” they pull off a really tight rack focus in the first 10ish minutes of an anime movie, which maybe isn't that remarkable but it really stuck with me because it felt like something I hadn't seen before. Honestly that movie is filled to the brim with direction choices that I can’t get enough of. Or in “Yi Yi” how they don’t even really call attention to the fact that the plant in Ting-Ting’s room is finally starting to sprout on the day the events of the movie come to a head. Yi Yi is full of little choices like that but I’m not just gonna sit here and list them all out you should watch it get acclimated to the best movie of the century (and I'm not exaggerating, even a little bit). Sometimes it doesn't even have to be technically impressive or anything, it can just be something the director likes that injects a bit of personality into the work. In Happyend they have ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U as himself in the beginning of the movie as the DJ that's playing when the kids are trying to get into the 18+ rave. That not only lets me know that director Neo Sora is tapped in for real but its a cool worldbuilding detail that not only grounds the movie as a near future story but also lends some real credence to these kids being underground music enjoyers. And if you don’t know who that is you don’t really lose much because you can still hear him spinning a #realchune anyway so you get what's going on.

Shunji Iwai is a serial flourish guy. His movies have this kind of thing in spades and it's one of the main things that stuck with me after watching his hit (not really) 2004 movie offering “Hana and Alice” which is a spinoff of a film he made that was commissioned by Nestle as an advertisement. That's not necessarily relevant but it's a fun fact I learned and now I can't get rid of. I can’t say I’m all in on the plot of Hana and Alice because to be honest it's pretty thin. Really what's doing the work here is the characters, the narrative is completely in service to them. Although I will say it’s got less holes than some people are making it out to have. People in the reviews are asking if the boy has no friends or people in his life to tell him these girls are lying to him and the answer is obviously not! He’s a weird recluse nerd who does rakugo and he isn't even very good at it of course he doesn't have any other friends. We see him in the rakugo club he’s in with only one other guy and he's often just studying the material instead of even meaningfully interacting with him. And so of course if this girl is fawning over him and saying that they're dating even if he’s not fully sold he’d go along with it. After all it beats walking around your small town by yourself repeating Jugemu Jugemu Gokō-no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu Kūnerutokoro-ni Sumutokoro Yaburakōji-no Burakōji Paipopaipo Paipo-no Shūringan Shūringan-no Gūrindai Gūrindai-no Ponpokopī-no Ponpokonā-no Chōkyūmei-no Chōsuke to yourself until you can do it from memory.

Circling back to the main topic, despite me not loving the story the real beauty of this film is all in the details and how much we come to learn about the characters without ever really being told any of it. And of course Iwai throws in some really strong visual flares to remind you whose movie you're watching. The most obvious thing to note is the difference in Hana and Alice's living situations. Hana lives in a really nice two story home with so many flowers decorating it that it's known as the flower house to kids in the neighborhood while Alice is living in straight up squalor. The inside of her apartment is a mess filled to the brim with garbage and various tchotchkes that Alice's mother has no doubt accrued as gifts from the men she frequents. Her mom is more concerned with getting ready for a date than anything her daughter could have going on. And so Alice lives inside this giant mess with so much stuff lying around they barely have room for the furniture that they own. And so as such Hana is the brattier and more immature of the two while Alice is a bit more grounded and practical. The girls have a really great opposites attract thing going even down to their hairstyles. And Hana being entitled isn't a meaningless trait its something you come to really get about her, the boy she likes isn't even the one she had initially set her eyes on but ended up liking anyway, she was close to quitting out on their ballet class but decides she can’t after getting a gift from their teacher; it’s a lot of little stuff. Bro she has a PC in her home, that is not something light in 2003/04.

The girls being opposing forces is a thematic throughline of the film even in the B-plots, which might seem superfluous at first but really do some work in fleshing out each of the girls characters. Alice gets scouted by a talent agency to do some modelling and acting while Hana follows in the footsteps of the boy she likes and joins the rakugo club. Again they become diametrically opposed while Alice ends up in a line of work about presenting an ideal, Hana ends up taking up a hobby all about exposing truths. Which works great as a parallel to the mad lie Hana spins that Alice ends up getting involved in. Where Hana is hiding the truth from this young man about their past relationship, Alice instead creates an ideal relationship that never was, indulging herself in the past and giving her a situation where she finally has all the agency. So she ends up reveling in it even though it's at Masashi's expense. And this is something that Alice actually does feel bad about even though she enjoys it too much to want to stop it anytime soon. And Masashi in turn genuinely begins to fall for her and submits himself to the idea that he lost his memory stating that his memories with her actually are coming back even though they don't exist. Meanwhile Hana and him are still going on dates that leave him feeling hardly anything more than an uneasy benevolence, he cannot be fully convinced that this is a girl he loved even though he does actually like her at least a little bit.

One of the most interesting scenes from a lighting perspective in the movie comes from one of these dates. Masashi and Hana are at the movies and as the projector glitches they are cast in a neon green glow that contrasts really strongly with all the red theater seats. Apart from looking tight as fuck, it really highlights the uneasiness of the situation, Masashi feels this dissonance with Hana and she’s teetering the edge of him finding out she's been lying the whole time. Not to mention the dream he describes to her where she chases him around as a slug and he can’t seem to recognise her. His brain is screaming at him that something is off and in the next scene when Hana ends up grabbing his hand while hers is covered in soap it reminds him of the dream and elicits one of the strongest reactions we get out of Musashi in the whole movie. He’s starting to put it together. Or maybe he thinks she’s really a slug. 

Fun fact! The movie they were watching was Horus: Prince of the Sun which was the directorial debut of anime legend Isao Takahata.

The Alice B-plot is a lot less consequential but nonetheless interesting as she's put in a variety of auditions but can’t quite seem to land any of them, she’s pretty passionless going through the motions of interviews and auditions not even sure why she’s doing this, compounded by the fact that she’s in rooms with a bunch super judgmental means girls and a bunch of theater freaks. She feels like she doesn't belong and still has no agency. Plus she comes to find out that her literal (talent) agency sucks and it lands as a pretty strong metaphor I'd say. Circling back to the girls being yin and yang, Hana’s lie can no longer function without help from Alice but when Alice calls upon Hana for moral support once she gets scouted she won't do it in favor of entertaining Musashi. 

So even after Masashi inevitably comes to find out the truth that he never actually lost his memories and no he did not used to date Alice and no he is not currently dating Hana the movie continues to linger around these B-plots because they matter to our characters. Because Hana hasn’t told Masashi she was lying and Alice is still aimless. So we press on. And while this is around the time it started to feel like the movie was too long I can’t deny the importance of what happens in that last 25 minutes.

This movie is very Japanese, which seems obvious because it's a Japanese movie but a lot of it is very strictly for the Japanese palette versus something like a Ghibli movie which is Japanese in origin but by nature meant to be accessible to all and sometimes even based on stories that aren't Japanese at all. But the main climax of the movie which is also for my money one of the best scenes in the whole thing revolves around rakugo which is something that requires at least a little context.
Rakugo is all about exposing truths, they're the Japanese equivalent of the parables and fairy tales we use to teach kids about certain virtues. And so of course there is no better character to put in a position to have to perform some rakugo than our Hana whose one little lie has ballooned way out of control and started to involve a whole host of people being gaslit. So before she can go on, she confesses to Musashi that she’s been lying. I mean at this point she knows she’s lost him, he’s more attached to those fake memories he has with Alice than any of the real time he’s spent with her already. So in the spirit of rakugo she tries to make sure she goes out there unencumbered by her lies. Musashi is a generally pretty well meaning kid so he doesn't hold it against her too much (which is honestly kinda crazy) and just insists that she go out there and “knocks ‘em dead”. She goes out and performs to an empty crowd which is pretty embarrassing but maybe even worse is the fact that it's not completely empty, who else but Alice is sitting front and center. Fresh off the fight they had almost an hour of movie earlier and yet, Alice is still willing to be there for her when nobody else is. 

And that's the real message here, that even though they both had a crush on the same boy all stemming from an elaborate lie which involved them ping ponging him back and forth on dates ending in a real fight between them over who gets to keep him, despite it all Hana and Alice will be stay friends through thick and thin. The two main girls have such great on screen chemistry it really makes that lived-in dynamic they have as believable as it is. They're so good together I was left wishing they had more shared screentime though I get why we went down this road, the movie about how being apart makes coming back together all the sweeter. And that the adversity they faced while apart only made them grow stronger when they got back together. Walking to school and laughing with each other like nothing ever happened. By the way what they're laughing at is the magazine Alice got to be on as her breakout after she crushes an audition where she insists on doing her dance and wows them with a stunning ballet sequence. Way to grab life by the horns girl and you didn't even need to trick anybody this time. 

So yeah I liked the movie, I think there's a lot here. It's a bit of a drag to get through but I’m still thinking about it a whole 24 hours later. In enough detail to write about even, go figure. The music was good although the sound track was not very many songs deep, it was all made by Iwai himself so I guess it tracks. I mentioned after my initial viewing that I felt like the movie was super indulgent on his part and I still feel that way, but it was him indulging in those tendencies that really endeared me to a lot of this. I can’t say I hate it! The late night photoshoot with the super overexposed lighting is so swaggy. The way he catches beams of light in the camera captures them like crystals to decorate the scene. How warm things feel when the girls are on good terms and how rainy and dull things get as the tensions between them rises. When you have this much sauce as a filmmaker you kinda earn the right to do this sort of thing. Nobody would call out Paul Thomas Anderson for his addiction to dad rock right? Even if you don’t love the song choices, they're all killer needle drops in “One Battle After Another” man I’m still thinking about those. And much like those I’ll take a lot of the small moments in Hana and Alice with me as well. 

Thanks for actually reading this if you did. I’m trying to get better at this kinda thing. Haha.