Impossible to Imagine (2019)

A Story That Barely Moves

Impossible to Imagine is the story of a woman who has contentedly painted herself into a corner in her life. She's running a business that has been handed down from generation to generation within her family and is on the verge of becoming obsolete due to the cultural and demographic changes in Kyoto. At the recommendation of a friend, she hires a business consultant to try and salvage the family business. He is half Japanese and half Australian and immediately offends her with his openness and willingness to examine what might be going wrong with her business. FL is a rigid traditionalist from the very first scene and to think of doing anything differently than she's always done it is offensive to her. But her desperation drives her to invite him back and continue to work with him. He offers some very workable solutions and she begins to cater to a more foreign born customer base. He serves as translator and emotional support when it's all too much for her, but he also creates the occasional problem by handling conflict in ways the locals find unacceptable. Despite this, they work well together and form an attachment that works for a while.
Eventually, his need to look to the future and to make changes and explore begins to feel like a constant threat to her need for everything to remain the same. The movie finishes with her and her father continuing to run the business with the added changes, but she breaks things off with the ML. Her complaint when they were together was that he wanted change to happen too fast. My complaint after watching the movie is that the character development was infinitesimal and story arc was pea sized. Maybe that was the director's point, to explore the cultural resistance to change that some areas in Japan are internally battling with, but man oh man, I wish there had been a more fruitful exploration. Imagine if the characters had learned that fear is the root of rigidity and that creativity can be employed to both preserve the loveliness of unique cultural expression and develop plans for adaptation to changing cultural tides. Imagine if she had taken the hand that offered to help her out of the corner she was painted into. Ugh. She denied the call to adventure and chose the safe and predictable option.
All that to say, the actors did well. They seemed like regular people that might actually exist. The technical side of the film was fairly amateur, but it didn't intrude into the story.

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