‘Nagi Notes’ Cannes Review: Koji Fukada Finds Intimacy and Upheaval in a Town Far From Tokyo

The film’s opening shots are unmistakably Japanese. A street corner seen from a distance — its particular light, its familiar architecture — gives way to a bus station where someone quietly goes about the work of cleaning. In the background, those sparse piano notes so characteristic of Japanese cinema ease us into the expected mood. And Koji Fukada’s film proves to be, for much of its running time, exactly what it promises: a calm, contemplative Japanese film about families, parents, children, fractured relationships, and restrained desires, unfolding over a handful of days in a small, out-of-the-way place.

Nagi is a town seven hours from Tokyo, and life there runs at a simpler, nearly rural pace. A nearby military base sends the sounds of weapons testing through the air, interrupting the stillness, as do the television reports filtering in from the war in Ukraine. But the town moves on its own time, its own rhythms. The other disruption comes in the form of Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect from Tokyo who arrives on foot, suitcase in hand. A shy teenager named Keita (Kiyora Fujiwara), cycling past, spots her and recognizes her from a painting he once saw in his art teacher’s home. He takes her there.

The relationships — and some of the tensions beneath them — soon come into focus. Yuri is the former sister-in-law of Yoriko (Takako Matsu); she was once married to Yoriko’s brother. Both women lost him but kept each other, and Yuri has made the trip to pose for a sculpture Yoriko wants to make of her. Also in the mix are Keita and Haruki (Waku Kawaguchi), two teenagers beginning to discover the world of art, drawn to each other in ways neither quite names — nothing like the farmers and soldiers who fill the surrounding landscape. Meanwhile, Haruki’s lonely father Yoshihiro (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) moves through the story with quiet, private intentions.

Moving day by day in the time before spring, Nagi Notes develops through the sessions between the two women — the posing, the stories they share, and the romantic tension that slowly surfaces, mostly on Yoriko’s side. Something similar seems to stir between the two teenagers. Both remain unspoken in a place as traditional as this one, held close in silence. Until, amid storms and mounting pressure and half-whispered declarations, all of it comes undone at once — launching a third act that feels borrowed from a different film entirely: more intense, more melodramatic, driven by action and even by suspense.

The shift is jarring, splitting Nagi Notes not just into two possible films but into two distinct modes of telling the same story. Some will prefer the care and subtlety of the first hour — its awkward silences, its shared anecdotes, its quiet everyday moments. Others will only fully connect when all those careful, tentative steps suddenly accelerate into a final collision of storms, loose animals, flights, pursuits, unexpected declarations of love, and impulsive decisions.

The seam between the two halves is rough — like skipping gears — and makes you wonder what another version of this film might have looked like. Despite that friction, Nagi Notes holds together as a quietly feminist work: in this world, it is unambiguously the women who make the decisions, each in her own way. No military base, no man in uniform can change that. Gently but with certainty, they are the ones who have kept this small town more or less intact in a world that is anything but.