‘Convenience Story’ Review – An Inconvenient Truth [Japan Cuts 2023]

In a story about a struggling writer struggling to write, the voice behind Convenience Story taking shape as a misunderstood male fantasy writer’s fantasy is concerningly telling for Satoshi Miki. When writer Kato (Ryo Narita) trips through a fridge door in the back of a deserted convenience store he enters another dimension. A married couple who tend the store reside there, despite the fact that no customers ever visit.

They exist in some kind of mirrored universe adjacent to our reality, but some things are a little…off. Prior to this, Kato met with a film agency who commissions a script from him, and before he entered this other dimension he just hit a creative wall. Kato holds a reputation for writing the same types of movies: male fantasies that highlight wish fulfillment. While his poorly realized non-male characters get sidelined, the male protagonist is heroized.

Yet it seems Miki doesn’t have anything critical to say about his central character. Kato plays into the stereotypes of a straight male, and there’s no question that he writes for other straight males in his creative space, but when that is written by Miki without any definitive voice to comment on Kato’s privilege it feels like an echo chamber. When Kato is presented with a natural opportunity in Convenience Story to make a change, he misses this cue — and all others — completely, but never faces consequences for the transgressions he makes. Kato defaults to the heroic archetype he writes in his own stories rather than assume any level of accountability.

Nowhere in Kato’s own journey does he examine how those archetypes are just mirrors of himself and not the typically misunderstood yet good-hearted main characters he believes them to be. He makes a conscious decision to harm the relationship between the two shop owners through romantic advances towards Keiko and hides it from Nagumo, her husband. He develops a possessive nature towards her which grows out of no tangible chemistry, and a relationship such as this would probably be written in one of Kato’s own stories, and so it happens here. Rather than explore something more interesting like focusing more on the mysterious tragedy Keiko says she is a survivor of — which Kato exploits to write a “better” script than what he came up with — we instead get a far more predictable forbidden love subplot.

The film’s usage of escapism is damaging because there are no ultimate consequences; Miki provides no such voice scrutinizing Kato’s missteps, conscious or unconscious. It results in a vision that meanders back into the territory of the problematic, and refuses to change despite what it has learned. To fill in the runtime a little more, Kato’s girlfriend Zigzag notices his absence and hires some strange characters to track him down and their dog (whom Kato took out to the country to ditch — another reason to despise him).

There are quite a few relatively bizarre characters that float around in Zigzag’s part of the journey, and her side of the story is easily more interesting than Kato’s. Some of these interactions wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in the middle of something like, say, any given season of Twin Peaks. Unlike how that show expertly balances its community while serving compelling and peculiar beats of drama, Convenience Story doesn’t provide any outlook on whatever community it tries to represent. There’s no inkling of a concrete, believable world that Kato has left behind.

Convenience Story seems like it wants to be called “Lynchian” but it doesn’t earn that. There are certain quirks Miki copies and pastes into characters around Kato and Zigzag but that’s as far as it goes. They’re, frankly, just distracting decorations that clash with the tone set by its original plot. Where any sort of redemption Kato requires to move past his harmful patterns is a complete vacuum causing no upset anywhere within the relationships he holds. There doesn’t have to be any such upset at all, but it still doesn’t justify the demeanor of what Miki presents as the hero of our story.

The only explanation is that in Kato’s scripts, the way events unfold in Convenience Story would happen by design. But by resting on this as the final statement Miki squanders a thread that could have actively interrogated why people like Kato think male fantasies such as theirs are so prevalent yet contrived and uninteresting. Unfortunately, this renders the supernatural final destination for Kato and the story moot despite how interesting it should be on paper. This is a film that just isn’t as self-aware as it might think and disappoints greatly because of it.

Convenience Story had its New York Premiere at Japan Cuts courtesy of Japan Society.

Director: Satoshi Miki

Writer: Satoshi Miki

Rated: NR

Runtime: 97m