Linda Linda Linda (2005)
Linda Linda Linda is a 2005 film about a Japanese high school band in the 3 days running up to a performance at the end of their senior year, at the conclusion of the multi-day Holly Festival. Their guitarist Moe has injured her hand and their singer Rinko has quit over a falling out with the keyboardist Kei, but rather than cancel the show they make a pivot - Kei will play guitar, and they ask the first person who walks by to sing for them - Son, the Korean exchange student.
Son's Japanese is bad enough that she didn't know what she was agreeing to, and Kei can't play guitar. They decide that rather than performing an original track as planned they'll cover the Blue Hearts, a punk band everyone knows.
Linda Linda Linda is about the things the film doesn't say it's about, because people don't usually tell us when we're having the best days of our lives and we resent it when they do. Throughout the film, people in the periphery of the band's scramble know how important this show will be for them, how the moments they're sharing can't be taken for granted, and any attempt to explicitly address this idea is shut down with the ruthlessness of a teenage girl disinterested in taking things so seriously.
I went into Linda Linda Linda expecting to enjoy it, I was primed by the googling I did after hearing about it, but I wasn't ready for it to sit in the back of my mind the way it has. It's an exceptionally simple story, with low stakes and a sparseness to its pacing - the editing has a film-student's love of lingering shots and extended pauses. The awkwardness of teenage socialisation against the raw emotional expression of punk rock hits extremely hard.
Throughout we get snippets of the Film Club documenting the festival, the director's confident incompetence mirroring those careful, measured, awkward silences.
These are the moments that make us - clumsy as they are, they lay the foundations of the people we will be.
Linda Linda Linda is available, with subtitles, on archive.org. The Blue Hearts are not on Spotify.