Swing Girls

This review is about another Japanese movie I watched a long time ago. This film, like the previous one, focuses on music—specifically jazz bands, a genre that was unfamiliar to me as a child. Aside from the music, the lively and energetic high school girls are what really stand out in the film, "Swing Girls."

 

Swing Girls Post

The Beginning of the Movie: High School Girls Starting a Band

The story begins during summer vacation at a high school in Japan. The students are tired and drained from boring supplementary lessons during the hot summer. The school’s baseball team heads off to a competition, and the school’s brass band leaves to cheer them on, leaving the school quiet. Soon after the band leaves, lunchboxes for the brass band are delivered to the school. The delivery person, finding the band already gone, doesn’t know what to do. Observing this, the protagonist gets an idea to skip the boring lessons by volunteering to deliver the lunches themselves. After getting their teacher’s permission, the students take the lunchboxes and board the train. While having fun, they secretly eat one of the lunches and eventually fall asleep on the train, missing their stop. The students get off at the next station and walk along the tracks to return, but while walking, they have to dodge an oncoming train by jumping into a nearby field, and in the process, the lunchboxes fall into the field and get ruined. Hiding the truth, they deliver the lunchboxes to the brass band, who then eats them and ends up with food poisoning. Since it was summer, and the food had fallen into the field, it wasn’t surprising that the lunches had spoiled. All the brass band members, except for one who didn’t eat the lunch, are rushed to the hospital with food poisoning, leaving the school with no band to cheer for the baseball team at the next game. In the end, the lone band member who avoided food poisoning, along with the protagonist, her friends, and two guitar-playing students who voluntarily joined after seeing the band recruitment poster, form a temporary jazz band. The protagonist and her friends, who initially had no interest in the band, start to develop a passion for it with the help (and mostly nagging) of the one remaining band member. When the group gathers for their first practice, their performance is a complete mess, but the girls enjoy it immensely nonetheless. However, when the brass band members recover from their food poisoning sooner than expected and return, the jazz band is immediately kicked out of the practice room. The protagonist and her friends try to act cool as they leave, but having just begun to enjoy the band, they can't help but shed tears of frustration and regret.

The protagonist, unwilling to give up, exchanges her younger sibling's game console for some old, second-hand instruments. She convinces her friends to raise money by taking part-time jobs, but they eventually get fired after causing trouble at the supermarket where they worked. While most of the girls give up, the protagonist, along with four other students and one boy who had left the brass band, refuse to let go of their dream. They head to the mountains to forage for mushrooms, where they are chased by a wild boar. By sheer luck, they manage to capture the boar and use the reward money to buy the instruments, thus restarting the band.

Passion for the Jazz Band

With no proper place to practice, the girls move from one spot to another, constantly getting kicked out due to their noisy and chaotic rehearsals. One day, while practicing, they receive some advice on jazz from a mysterious man. The girls follow him and discover that he is none other than their boring math teacher! Surprised by his deep knowledge of jazz, they beg him to become their band’s instructor, and he reluctantly agrees. However, the teacher himself had no real talent with instruments, having quit after only a week of learning in the past. Determined to help the students, he begins learning the instrument again, teaching the girls what he learned from his own music lessons. Under his guidance, the girls gradually improve to the point where they can play as an ensemble. The girls, who had fallen in love with jazz, end up performing at the supermarket from which they were previously fired. The former bandmates who had quit earlier are moved by their jazz performance and rejoin the group.

The Climax: Competing in the Band Competition

Winter arrives, and the band is scheduled to participate in a band competition. However, due to the protagonist’s delay in submitting the application form, the band is disqualified from entering. The protagonist, unable to tell her friends who are busy preparing for the competition, stays silent. On the day of the competition, the girls board a train to the event, only to be stopped by heavy snowfall. Worried, the protagonist finally reveals the truth about their disqualification, causing her friends to be deeply disappointed. Just then, they hear jazz music playing on the radio of a man sitting in the same train car, and the girls spontaneously begin performing right there in the train. In that moment, they realize that their true love lies not in competitions but in their passion for music and their love for the band.

At that point, their original band teacher arrives in the snow with the news that, due to the storm, other bands were unable to attend, and their band would be allowed to compete after all. The teacher picks them up in a bus and takes them to the competition venue. Initially nervous, the girls calm down, prepare, and deliver a fantastic jazz performance, marking the end of the movie.

Movie Review

I don’t know much about music, but the movie features frequent jazz ensemble performances, including several famous tracks that even I recognized, making it an enjoyable watch. The exaggerated and lively personalities of the high school girls typical of Japanese films keep the movie entertaining and far from boring. Before long, you may even find yourself humming along with the film’s music.

Though the idea of starting a band in the summer and competing in the winter with a great performance may seem far-fetched, there’s a behind-the-scenes story that the actors themselves learned to play the instruments over three months and performed the music in the film. So, it doesn’t seem too unrealistic after all. I’m not sure how successful this movie was in Japan, but the actors even held live performances, making it fun to see the cast actually playing their instruments in real life.