Mishima's Ozu-Inspired Film Enters Tokyo Competition — SkimNews
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- Two Cigarettes, Three Nights is in competition at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, adapts Chihaya Akane’s 2014 novel, and offers a different approach from the dark relationship dramas for which Mishima Yukiko is known.
- Mishima Yukiko shot the adaptation in Kyoto, Hiroshima and Toyama Prefecture, avoiding cliché tourist images such as temples and cherry blossoms; many of the novel’s café scenes became walks along riverbanks and railroad tracks.
- Ozu Yasujiro inspired the film’s side-by-side staging and long, uncut views: Kanna and Haseo face the same direction on trains, buses and at a ramen counter, while a personal story gradually opens onto the world.
- Matsuoka Mayu and Narita Ryo were cast for comic timing in long dialogue scenes, but Mishima made the film more intimate and complex than the sex comedy its first act hints at, leaving the ending open to interpretation.
- Sawai Kaori wrote the talky script that Mishima makes visually dynamic through location and staging, while Kanna and Haseo’s bantering dialogue brings unfiltered honesty to their friendship after a seven-year gap.
- Kanna gains a perspective on herself and the world during three eventful days with Haseo, then encodes what she learns in Hiroshima into a final painting that delivers the film’s central message.
- Haseo keeps his relationship with Kanna platonic, but a bartender thinks she is hurting him and a jaded college friend admits cheating on her husband while sympathizing with Kanna’s infidelities, adding multiple perspectives.
Why it matters: At the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, viewers encounter a competition entry built around long dialogue, sustained movement and an ending left open to interpretation, not the light sex comedy its opening suggests. Mishima’s Ozu-informed staging also turns Kanna’s three-day encounter with Haseo into a change in how she sees herself and the wider world.
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