(Warning: this review gives away spoilers on a turning point in the film. I'll put an appropriate warning just before the spoilers.)

Sometimes, someone flies in like a comet in your life, and the beauty of it is in the evanescence of the interaction. In Japanese Story, director Sue Brooks gives us a geologist named Sandy (Toni Collette), and a protagonist named Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima). Their names may be obvious, but little else is about their characters: Tachibana Hiromitsu (to use his full name) is the straight-laced, buttoned-down product of Japanese cultural norms and stifling family business, while Sandy is the hard-as-nails geologist. No hearts on sleeves here. There's obviously more to the two main characters, of course. Collette does a wonderful job of depicting Sandy visibly softening as she gets into contact with Hiro. Collette's face, looking upon Hiro emerging from the water, is a wonder of multiple emotions: curiosity, aesthetic appreciation of his body, archness. And Hiro clearly has reserves - an offhand reference to a Mayan temple, for one - that are untapped (geology metaphor deliberate).

Sandy's supposed to show Hiro around and sell him some geological software in doing so, which makes for some standard, but funny, cross-cultural misunderstandings. This is the first time I've seen Toni Collette in an Australian movie since Muriel's Wedding (not sure if it was her first Aussie movie post-Muriel), but she was amazing in that and she brought redemption to what could otherwise have been a completely pitiable character in About a Boy. And so no surprises to find her physicality marks her powerful acting in this movie: at the start, she's visibly hard, her powerful shoulders taking the load of bearing this boy-man.

Ah, but lulled into a different world, enduring the intensity of the outback landscape, the two slowly fall for each other. Under that searing desert sun, what are cultural differences, after all? There's a transporting quality to certain landscapes: it's similar to the way the intensity of the Mexican sun makes a mockery of age differences in Japón (the Mexican film I watched at last year's Singapore Film Festival). Actually, Japanese Story made me think a lot about Japón. Superficially, both feature Japan in their titles; more pertinently, both feature wide expanses of uninhabited space and that overpowering sun with its shimmering mirages and the joy and madness therein. Maybe it's because the condition's so alien to someone who's most used to city life and who was shocked at the amount of empty space in Massachusetts, of all places (gives you an idea how cramped Singapore is) but filmic depictions of vast expanses of alien landscape (like the Joshua Tree National Park in twentyninepalms) and the quality of sunlight on sand (see Y Tu Mama Tambien) have a tendency to scorch my mind. The endless outback in Japanese Story creates a kind of hypnosis, and Ian Baker's nifty camera work in depicting it makes it easy to see how both parties crumble and fall for each other.