Evoking in spirit the 21st century aura of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo, Ryuichi Hiroki’s cinematic blog of a thirty-something manic depressive is similarly besotted with its radiant lead actress. Like Mambo’s Shi Qi, Shinobu Terajima’s blithe modern woman traverses ecstatic highs and subterranean lows in a performance of staunch, yet fragile independence. The camera can’t get enough of her.

Afflicted with a condition triggered by the death of her closest friends and family (all victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, so she claims), her loner existence is cushioned by an online support group and fleeting encounters with a circle of feeble men: a self-confessed pervert, a gambling cousin, a manic depressive yakuza, and an erectile-dysfunctional candidate for local body politics. Hardly great catches. Such companionship, however soothing, offers little in the way of reciprocation, leaving her emotionally at her most precarious. Severe bouts of depression loom, only for her to emerge from the shadows beaming again. The film’s dangling carrot is whether she can keep moving forward – with or without a man.

For Hiroki, this is far from a dreaded “difficult second album”; the follow-up to his breakout feature Vibrator, this is less self-conscious and considerably more assured. It also reaches well beyond the social context of its Japanese framework, commenting in equal parts on a global generation of uncertain, unproductive young adults (a reoccurring theme this festival), and the upheaval of endemic Japanese values, where women are choosing to reject married life in favour of an emancipating, solo status – something Ozu’s strong-minded women fought for, but never quite followed through with.—Tim Wong