A train car attendant and a failing movie producer escape to the beautiful countryside of Hakone, hoping to find adventure…
A nostalgic road trip drama about family set aboard the bullet train “Romancecar” between Shinjuku, central Tokyo and Hakone (a famous tourist area with hot springs), Round Trip Heart is an enjoyable albeit middlingly forgettable 2015 Japanese release that’s worth watching purely for the emotional quirks.
Hachiko Hojo (Oshima Yuko) is an attendant upon the romancecar serving drinks and snacks, this is where we first meet her during the film amidst her work and carriages. An altercation with a thief, followed by a brief police meeting and missing her return train to Tokyo, leads Hachiko on an adventure with the thief Sakuraba Yoivhi (Okura Koji) across the countryside. The thief Sakuraba (affectionately referred to by Hachiko as ‘Oldie’) leads Hachiko off to recreate a childhood holiday she once embarked upon with her now-divorced parents, in the vain hope of finding her mother.
Round Trip Heart is a film that eloquently flows along, with small moments of emotional drama occasionally cropping up, interspersed with flashbacks of Hachiko’s holiday as a young child, to create emotional responses in the audience. Overall this works well, with scenes in Hakone, bright blue lakes, hot springs and beautiful grassy fields creating a scenic experience for the viewer whilst Hachiko and Sakuraba talk about their past. The film always dances around the romance-comedy genre to promote laughs, but instead stays rather realistic in the way that we never see the two characters hook up, but maintain a flirty friendship throughout the script.
The actors themselves fit well into the roles, with Yuko Oshima playing a very bubbly and likeable Hachiko (something that might be a surprise for AKB48 fans, who are used to seeing her on the pop stage), and her work with veteran co-star Okura Koji often finds Oshima instead stealing the screen. Yuki Tanada’s directing feels minimalistic throughout, as the characters seem to flow in scenes that almost feel off the cuff in scripting, whilst the camerawork itself is rather platonic in movement and instead focuses on precise framing and beauty shots to create a mellow cinematic road trip adventure.
Overall, Round Trip Heart is a loveable film that I would heartily endorse, though I would suggest that it might get lost amongst the plethora of mid-range Japanese drama films on the market. There is nothing there that makes it standout, and nothing that drags it down, but overall the fact that it’s an enjoyably memorable film is enough of a reason to watch Round Trip Heart in the first place.