Breaking Kinda Bad
Japan’s least interesting movie star tries to tap her inner bad bitch. Yeah. No.
Magical Secret Tour
Director: Chihiro Amano • Writers: Chihiro Amano, Madoka Kumagai
Starring: Kasumi Arimura, Haru Kuroki, Sara Minami
Japan • 1hr 57mins
Opens Hong Kong October 1 • IIA
Grade: B-
Magical Secret Tour | マジカル・シークレット・ツアー has a tremendous premise. Three average Japanese women – housewife and mother of two Wakako (bafflingly still employed, Kasumi Arimura, Black Showman), genetic researcher Kiyoe (Haru Kuroki, 18x2 Beyond Youthful Days) and hostess bar worker Mayu (Sara Minami, Road to Vendetta) – meet in Singapore when each signs up for a shady, get-rich-quick smuggling racket. In various iterations and for various reasons they’re all in dire need of cash and feeling undervalued, so when the scheme results in a long weekend away, new friendships and, above all, a shitload of easy money for muling gold bricks into Japan each feels they’ve hit the financial and emotional jackpot.
Based on the 2017 arrest of a group or desperate housewives at Nagoya’s Chubu Airport, this is the kind of stranger than fiction, under-the-radar feminist adventure that should sit well within director Chihiro Amano’s comfort zone, plus she’s grappled with the shitty position too many Japanese women find themselves in before, best in Sato and Sato. The thing is, Magical Secret Tour doesn’t know quite what it wants to be, and so isn’t really anything. There isn’t enough demi-thriller shenanigans to make it a One Last Heist romp, and it’s not grounded in enough reality to make it an angry, womanly screed. It’s fine. It’s just not memorable. And it doesn’t help that Arimura, Japan’s dullest actor, is supposed to anchor the story, which ironcially she does. She drags the whole thing down into murky, boring depths with her while serving up her single milquetoast expression. Why does she work so much?
Centred, like the badass she’s not
There’s something buried deep down in Tour that’s worth watching, and for a few minutes early on Amano and co-writer Madoka Kumagai appear to be excavating it. In swift, efficient (if pedestrian) brushstrokes we learn – and above all feel – Wakako’s mix of fear, fury and frustration at finding out her just-hospitalised husband Takashi (Akihisa Shiono) has been fired for embezzling from work and the family is now broke. She has small children to feed. We get why scientist Kiyoe is lonely and quietly enraged, after giving up any semblance of a life for science, only to see her best work appropriated by the all-male crew in her lab. And we empathise with the old-before-her-time Mayu, stuck working in a hostess bar and taking care of her younger sister when their dead beat mother can’t or won’t. Not because she must but because she wants to. After getting back to Japan and getting paid handsomely for a minor, victimless crime, the trio finds itself unexpectedly empowered financially, with a vibrant new senses of agency, and best of all stoked enough to stand up for themselves and tell everyone who’s taking advantage of, underappreciating or dismissing them what they really think. Gurl, snap!
Where Amano goes off the rails is in never deciding which rail she wants to ride. As a start, Magical Secret Tour doesn’t lean into its caper DNA. Naturally greed and ambition get the better of Wakako, Kiyoe and Mayu, and their plan unravels spectacularly. But by the time Wakako bitch slaps her her husband’s boss Tanoue (Takumi Saitoh) and her mother (Rie Minemura), Kiyoe sticks it to the lab head (Shiro Sano) and Mayu starts swiping valuables from rich bizniz dudes the wheels have come off the characters as well as the story. The women aren’t undone by hubris, they’re undone by their own stupidity. That’s not fair.
On the other hand the film doesn’t really use the smuggling as background colour for a deeper, more considered exploration of labour exploitation, unequal family expectation and obligation, sex work ghettos and how those weigh on contemporary Japanese women to the point that rebellion via breaking the law and stepping out of their socially acceptable lanes might be an appealing option. It’s a little of this, a little of that, and not enough of either to make an impact. How on earth you make three respectable Japanese ladies sneaking gold bars through the airport (also, where are the metal detectors?) in diaper bags, crutches and bras unengaging is beyond me. If you want a truly gripping thriller that’s also a howl of rage, find a copy of Natsuo Kirino’s Out. It’s a book, so it’s 100% Arimura-free.