Swing Girls

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Swing Girls
Swing Girls film poster
Directed by	Shinobu Yaguchi
Produced by	Shintaro Horikawa, Daisuke Sekiguchi
Written by	Junko Yaguchi, Shinobu Yaguchi
Starring	Juri Ueno, Yuta Hiraoka
Release date(s)	September 11, 2004
Running time	105 min
Language	Japanese
Budget	~ ¥500,000,000
IMDb profile

Swing Girls (スウィングガールズ; Suwingu gaaruzu) is a 2004 comedy film co-written and directed by the Japanese filmmaker Shinobu Yaguchi about the efforts of a group of high school girls to form a jazz band.

Swing Girls is set in rural Yamagata prefecture, in northern Japan and the characters often use the local Yamagata-ben dialect for comic effect.

The film ranked 8th at the Japanese box office in 2004, and won seven prizes at the 2005 Japanese Academy Awards, including 'Most Popular Film' and 'Newcomer of the Year' awards for Yuta Hiraoka and Juri Ueno.

The cast includes Yuta Hiraoka (Takuo, the leader of the band), Juri Ueno (Tomoko), Shihori Kanjiya (Yoshie), Yuika Motokariya (Sekiguchi) and Yukari Toyashima (Naomi). The actors performed their own music for the film.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie begins at a school in Japan. It is extremely hot outside, and summer classes are being held. One class is where our story begins. It is the remedial math class, containing thirteen girls and a nervous, anti-social teacher named Ozuwa. While rambling on, one of the girls, Tomoko, looks outside the window to see the school's brass band, featuring one depressed Nakamura, planning on giving the teacher a "quitting the band" slip, but unable to follow through. The brass band leaves for a baseball game, and moments later, a lunch truck arrives. The driver notices he is late and is also late for a catering. Tomoko, wanting to get the heck out of math class, decides to deliver the lunches with the others for him.

On the train ride over, Tomoko pops a lunch open and the girls devour it. They also sleep to the stop, and realize they are going to miss it, but the doors slide shut before they can get out. The girls are dropped off at an outdoor train stop. Now they are faced with two challenges: either wait another hour for the next train or get to the stadium by foot. They choose going by foot, and when they did, they lost some of the lunch dodging a train and procrastinated at a nearby stream. They meet Nakamura at the stadium and pass out the lunches. When they finish, Nakamura demands to know where HIS lunch was, and Tomoko claims to nothing, but as wise as Nakamura is and as dumb as Tomoko is, Nakamura discovers a spec of food on Tomoko's chin. He says nothing, and he buys his own lunch as the girls leave. As he eats, he notices that his fellow band members got sick from the lunches since they spoiled in the summer heat thanks to the girls' procrastination. All 42 of them, teacher and all, go to the hospital. That night, Tomoko watches the horrible event on the news and is petrified over the whole thing.

The next day, hoping for a miracle, Nakamura holds an audition for new recruits. He gets two punk rockers who need to "make some noise" after their band broke up and shy, bright, unsocial girl named Sekiguchi, who only knows how to play the recorder. Now Nakamura is desperate, and all that changes when he hears the Tomoko and the other girls outside. His desperation turns to rage and he stomps out into the hall and startles the girls. He starts chewing them out because he found out that they messed up those lunches. He also tells them-not asks them-that they will fill in for the brass band. The girls try to refuse, but Nakamura threatens to rat them out if they don't join, and for some of those girls, that next rat-out would be their last. Otherwise it was to escape math class, so the girls reluctantly joined.

The girls start to clown around with the instruments, except for Sekiguchi. Nakamura is getting no control over them, until Sekiguchi accidentally knocks over some big band records. One rolls down the hall into the hands of the school's star baseball player, who acts nonchalant as he storms into the room, due to hating Nakamura. While being confronted, Nakamura realizes that he can turn the girls into a big band instead of a brass band, because it was to avoid a beating by the baseball player and because they were 8 people short of a brass band. As he introduces the concept to the girls, he also remembers that teaching brass band instruments to 16, not-so-bright girls in Nunavut is not easy, especially if it needs to be done in time for the game next week. Later on, Nakamura, alone in the band room, realizes that everyone is dependent on the girls, and that if he quit the band now, the people would be disappointed and the baseball player would come after him, so he tears up the "quitting the band" slip.

As the week rolls on, Nakamura trains them physically to improve their lung strength. Everyone stumbles along, except for Sekiguchi, who strolls through the tasks with flying colors. Tomoko faces some conflicts with Nakamura along the way, but she realizes that in order to escape trouble, she must get along with him.

On the day before the game, the girls run through a jazz piece and are pretty good in it, although a little squeaky in some places. As they marvel their work, all 42 brass band members walk in and take over again. Everyone except Sekiguchi is eager to get the heck out, but once the girls step out of the building, they break down into tears. They relize that they liked playing in a big band.

When school kicks up again, Tomoko passes by the band room as the band members run through scales. She asks the band teacher what happen to Nakamura, and her response was that he quit at last. The band teacher offers Tomoko a chance to play, and she begins to accept, but as she enters the room she sees Sekiguchi. Remembering how cruelly she treated her back when the band was still in business, Tomoko leaves. A while later all the girls meet to discuss how to raise some money to buy new instruments. Some ideas are brought up but they are unfeasable, and despite the fact that Nakamura's family is loaded, he can't pitch in because he's afraid he'll get a beating from his parents. Finally they settle on an idea: they decide to get jobs.

The girls are employed at a supermarket, and at the number and rate they work, they raise a lot of money. Everything goes fine, but despite the fact that the girls are determined, Tomoko loses most of the money by pouring wine into a frying pan and starting a fire. As the girls leave, a shocking secret is discovered when it is learned that everyone except Tomoko, her best friend Yoshie, Sekiguchi, and Naomi blow have spent all of their hard-earned money on designer clothes. The girls who spent their money on clothes announce a schism and run off with the school's baseball player for a second life of endless partying and procrastination, leaving the four girls and a small chunk of money, to continue the band on their own.

Tomoko considers herself covered when she sells her computer and little sister's PS2 to buy a used sax (of poor condition). However, the rest of the girls need money, and after more brainstorming, they decide to pick mushrooms in the mountains by way of connections via Sekiguchi. When they get to the mountains, though, they realize that the connections are a dud, there is a tresspassing fine, and that the forest rangers are heading in that direction. They try to escape, but a hungry boar attacks them and goes for the portly Naomi. She climbs up a tree hoping to escape the boar and then falls down onto the boar's head. The boar's skull splits open, killing it on impact. The forest rangers find them, and what seemed like another failure is turned around when they were rewarded a huge sum of money for killing a crop-killing boar.

They buy the instruments, but they turn out to be broken and old, so now they have to fix them, but they already blew their money getting the instruments. However, they get in luck when the punk rockers take them to the junkyard to have their ex-bandmates--also ex-boyfriends who are desperate to get them back-- to fix them up. Now that they have the gear, they can start playing, but their skills are as messed up as their instruments, and after trying a few places to play, they are not very sucessful.

Then fate changes one day when Sekiguchi meets a man after one of their failed gigs to get some advice. The others try to meet him, but he leaves too fast and flees. They catch up to him at his house and peek through his window, to find his house is a big band shrine. The man sits down to play the sax, but this is no ordinary man; it is Ozuwa. He sees their refection in his mirror. He invites them in and starts to teach them how to actually play jazz, while keeping a very fate-changing secret. Their luck also increases to the point where one day they play in front of the supermarket they got fired from. The other girls that had previously left see this, and are so moved that they go and sell their designer clothers to buy instruments to rejoin the band, thus removing the schism and restoring the band to its original size.

Later on in the middle of the winter, Tomoko tells the others about a winter music festival where they could actually prove themselves. They all agree to go and coax Ozuwa to conduct. He reluctantly agrees, and the next day they go to the roof of the school to record the audition tape. When they finish, they leave Tomoko in charge of sending the tape, with plenty of time to spare; however, Tomoko is a procrastinator, and soon the weeks turn into days, and Tomoko has not sent in the audition tape yet. She hastily turns it in, and weeks later she gets a reply saying that due to a surplus in applications, the contest has been changed to a first come, first served basis, and because Tomoko procrastinated as is her habit, they've been rejected. Crushed, Tomoko decides not to tell anyone in fear that it would blow everything they've worked for.

Fate also turns against them when, during a hair appointment, Nakamura discovers that Ozuwa is not really a professional sax player and was privately taking lessons across the street from his hair stylist. Embarasssed, Ozuwa confessed that he was never a good sax player and only learned to play to impress the school's music teacher. He makes Nakamura swear that he will never tell a soul. He also decides to back out of conducting.

On the train ride there, Tomoko sits alone in another car. Nakamura decides to go over and cheer her up. While the others think it's a confession of love, Nakamura could tell by her feelings that she did not send the tape on time. She says to him that she did not have the heart to tell anyone, so Nakamura tells them for her, and crushes their spirit. To make matters worse, the train stops due to rapid snowfall causing a tree to land on the track. While listening to a radio, the girls play along and renew their spirit. The music isn't just a cheer-up, though; it's also a signal. The school's band teacher finds them and rushes them by bus to the auditorium; they have a spot since another band could not make the competition.

They spill out onto the stage just as the announcer declares they would not attend, causing the audience much amusement. They set up and play a 15-minute concert. While wooing the crowd, Ozuwa actually comes in to conduct and the punk rockers' boyfriends try to get them to notice them. At the end, they win the competition and learn valuable lessons: Naomi learns about obesity (your applause is not judged by your waistline); Yoshie learns about confidence (finding what moves you); Sekiguchi learns about standing out (making a difference in someone's life); Nakamura learns about leadership (controlling more than just other people); the punk rockers learn about love (those who commit themselves to you truly love you); and Tomoko learns about passion (keeping commitment to something instead of laying it off or procrastinating). With these lessons learned, the movie ends.