The Shifting Family Shape

In this day and age, a kid can't always expect the same people to be their parents throughout their childhood, but few have had the parade of fathers that little Mitan has in 2018's Soshite, baton wa watasareta (そして、バトンは渡された, "And, the baton was passed"). It gets bogged down in sentimentality in the last act but this is a basically entertaining little drama.

Initially, the story is presented with two separate threads, following Mitan as a small child (Inagaki Kurumi) as well as the girl once she's in high school and goes by the name of Yuko Morimiya (Nagano Mei). For all we know, they're different people, at first. Mitan lives with a father who works in agriculture and Yuko's father is a shy man with an office job.

Mitan's mother has recently passed away and one day her father meets a beautiful young woman, Rika, (Ishihara Satomi) with expensive tastes. You expect the voraciously smiling dame to be a ruin to the family but she and Mitan actually develop a bond over shopping for clothes and makeup. Then, Mitan's father gets a job in Brazil. He wants to relocate the family but Rika won't have it. So he moves alone to Brazil and Rika hides all of his letters to Mitan. And she finds another husband, a wealthy man, and tells Mitan he's her new father.

That's dad number two. Eventually she absconds with a third, the shy man whom we first met as Yuko's father, and at last, the stories connect at about the halfway point.

Yuko's story is less interesting, being a fairly average teen romance in which she falls in love with a handsome young man who, like her, also loves playing piano. The filmmakers wisely realised that Rika was the most interesting character in the movie and the last part of the film focuses on solving the mystery of why she's no longer in Yuko's life, as well as the mystery of why she collected fathers for Mitan/Yuko. The latter is never quite answered satisfyingly and, unfortunately, the last act of the film indulges in the kind of overwrought sentimentality that plagues too much modern Japanese cinema. But for the most part, it's an enjoyable film.

Soshite, baton wa watasareta is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.