One’s first impulse watching Mike Ott’s Littlerock is to think of it as a kind of inverse Lost In Translation. The two films mirror one another in a couple of ways. In Lost In Translation, two Americans, Bob and Charlotte, meet and become friends in a high-end Tokyo hotel, bonding over a shared sense of culture shock and existential ennui. In Ott’s, two Japanese siblings, Atsuko and Rintaro, are struck by a similar sense of culture shock in the barren town of the film’s title. Both films spend a lot of time watching their characters wander through landscapes—Tokyo’s neon-lit streets for Bob and Charlotte, Littlerock’s rural-suburban emptiness for Atsuko and Rintaro—that are wholly unfamiliar to them. Both films get a lot of mileage—comic in Lost In Translation‘s case and tragic-comic in Littlerock‘s—out of language barriers and people failing to communicate with one another. Both involve late-breaking heartbreak and pained goodbyes.
But, in one important sense, the inversion thesis doesn’t quite hold up. Lost In Translation used Japan as a setting in which to consider the American condition. Littlerock does not use central southern California as a sitting in which to consider the Japanese one. Indeed, the protagonists at times feel less like characters than like semi-mute avatars for the audience, a means of forcing the viewer to consider the film’s true subject through foreign eyes. America—its geography, its history, its internal tensions—remains front and centre.
It does so in the person of Cory, a loveable, somewhat pathetic hanger-on who befriends Atsuko and Rintaro on their first night in town, and who quickly develops a crush on the former. Anyone who grew up outside of a major centre will immediately recognise Cory as a version of themselves: he is what we might have become had we never gotten out, a thwarted desire to escape made manifest. Tricking himself into believing that the drop-kicks around him are his friends, when in fact they merely tolerate him, Cory quickly becomes possessive of the tourists, who to him represent the world beyond the truck stops at the edge of town. (One gets the sense that Cory falls for Atsuko precisely because she isn’t a local and therefore someone who knows him well enough to know better.) Cory promises to show the visitors around, to take them under his undersized wing.
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American violence, on the other hand, is unique to this one. It comes to the fore only subtly, in the film’s final reel, when Rintaro returns to Littlerock and the reason for the pair’s vacation becomes clear. (There are clues throughout, though Australian audiences may not immediately pick up on them.) The Japanese visitors to America are ultimate revealed to be indirect products of it. And Littlerock is ultimately revealed to be an paean to what might have been.
MIFF Extended Program Note, July 2011
