I will tread carefully here, so as not to give anything away.

Naoko has just returned with her young daughter to the village of her birth and childhood, after a (presumably nasty) divorce. She tries to fit in, although it seems that just about everyone in this little burg has one problem or another. Her two friends from childhood, Tomochan and Mitchan, are no exceptions...but something doesn't quite make sense.

She starts, or resumes, a relation with a local high school teacher, which however is conducted in secrecy and shadows, up to a point. Tomochan and Mitchan seem supportive, but again, something is odd here.

Stick with it--with the foul-mouthed middle-aged women who frequent the beauty salon ("Permanent nobara"--the "permanent wild rose" that is a metaphor for Naoko herself),the crazy old man who takes a chainsaw to utility poles, causing frequent power outages, and to many other crazy goings-on besides.

We didn't see it coming. You won't either.

Permanent Nobara is another off beat Japanese dramatic comedy film from the director of the excellent "Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!". The combination of a somewhat low key method of film making, along with a general under current of steady weirdness throughout, is inherent to this director's approach to storytelling, and if this movie and "Funuke" are any indication, it's obvious this is something this director is quite good at.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Miho Kanno stars as Naoko; a single mom with a young daughter who's forced to relocate to her backwards home town after her recent divorce. It soon becomes clear that just about everyone living in this small seaside fishing village is a little bit off, from her now grown childhood friends, to the unreliable available men in town, to the oversexed and overly gossipy gaggle of middle aged hags who hang out at a hair salon that does only one hair style; tightly coiled perms that look dreadful.

Naoko has no choice but to reintegrate herself into this small town however, and she does so as best as possible while she tries to get her life back together. Her daily dealings with the strange collection of town folk is frequently amusing and sometimes touching. She doesn't seem to mind or even care that everyone in town is a bit weird, and she in no way looks down on these people.

For much of the story, Naoko is fairly aimless; she doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to her child, and spends much of her time revisiting her old friends, trying to reconnect with her divorced parents, and helping out at the salon on occasion. She's seems almost carefree and lazy at times, and for much of the film, she simply serves as a proxy for the viewer to observe the goings on around her. She soon starts a cautious relationship with her former home town high school teacher though, and from there the story begins to focus more and more on her alone. There is a slight problem with this new relationship however, and things don't always go the way Naoko has hoped for with the new man in her life, and that leads her to begin questioning what she is doing, and eventually her own sanity. Watch and see how things work out for our heroine and those around her (if anything works out for any of them).

There are a fair amount of comedic scenes here (sometimes darkly so),but this movie is much more of a dramatically driven affair than compared to "Funuke...". It can be quite a bit sad at times actually, but there is enough comedy throughout, and plenty of the wonderful signature strangeness I've now come to expect from this director. I'm very much looking forward to his next film.

Solidly recommended...If you understand and enjoy what the majority of these types of Japanese are like. 7 out of 10 stars, if so!