Littlerock | Film review

Like an inverted Lost in Translation—dreamy culture shock and mild stereotypes included—Littlerock strands a pair of touristing Japanese siblings in some forgotten corner of California. Their rental car has broken down just outside the titular town, a sleepy desert community where the twentysomething locals all have drinking problems and dead-end service jobs. At least the scenery is nice. “It reminds me of that western movie you like so much,” writes Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), the sister, to her father back home. Like the setting, she’s pretty but vaguely defined—the moody fashion-model starlet of this glorified Levis commercial.

When her brother (Rintaro Sawamoto) takes off for San Francisco, Atsuko stays behind and gets caught between two suitors: a quiet-cool hipster cowboy (Brett L. Tinnes) and the chatty, good-hearted village idiot (Cory Zacharia) who puts her up. (The movie regards the latter, an aspiring artiste, with an unseemly mixture of pity and contempt.) Given the language barrier, there’s a certain sad futility to these fledgling courtships; a botched phone-call farewell hits its heartbreaking mark. Then again, maybe things aren’t so bad for our stranger in a strange land: Without the luxury of subtitles, she’s got no idea just how vapid her American admirers really are. Only when Atsuko pops in her headphones, effectively drowning out the banal dialogue of her dueling love interests, does Littlerock grant us the same blissful ignorance.