Again (2015) — Sumio Omori
A sometimes confusing homage to baseball and its players.
The poster above shows a call for baseball supporters, most probably to appear in the movie as extras. And chances are they may have had a big return, since Japanese people still carry a tender affection towards the sport. Especially in situations where one has to talk about something deeply loved, it is easy to lose one self in the middle of the process. I believe that’s what happened in “Again”.
The movie is based on an unpublished novel written by prolific every day Japanese writer Kiyoshi Shigematsu and it tells the story of a university student, Mie Tozawa (Haru), who loses her dad, a baseball fan who used to play it in high school, in the Tohoku Tsunami. She works with a baseball tournament designed for mature players, based on the famous “Koushien Tournament”, which is played among high school teams from all over the country and is crucial in deciding who’s going to make it to the professional league. Unfortunately, Mie’s dad never gets the chance to play at the symbolic Koushien Arena, where the tournament takes place. So she manages to find and talk to the men who played with him at the time, and to whom he used to write New Year postcards that were never sent. It turned out her dad had a reason to cut ties with them; a reason Mie ends up finding about later on in the story.
It gets confusing because the central story of the deceased dad is constantly interrupted by the other teammates’ side stories, which aren’t fully developed. By the time the movie ends, we understand it wasn’t about her dad at all, but about the team and its passion towards the sport. Still, it could’ve been better told and organized so that the plot wouldn’t have giant leaps, which were probably elucidated in the book — although unable to find comfort in the big screen.
Nevertheless, it is a homage to baseball: a team sport, that depends deeply on the ties among players. In that sense, it makes sense to understand the failure of the team in getting to the Koushien Tournament as the failure of understanding what was going on inside the group. This message at least is clear in the film.
