Under the Turquoise Sky — Kentaro [Japan Cuts ’23 Review]

No film festival would be complete without a road movie. For the 2023 edition of Japan Cuts, the U.S. premiere of Under the Turquoise Sky checks that box. The country being traveled is Mongolia, and the stated purpose is for Takeshi (Yuya Yagir) to find a woman at his grandfather’s request. It’s a film replete with beautiful images, but it’s not quite a beautiful film. There isn’t a single persuasive or winsome character in it; it falls into the same trap of Western films and the romanticized “going East” trope; and, quite frankly, there just isn’t all that much going on in between the appropriately simple images to make it worth watching.

Of course, the real purpose is the journey itself, filled with gorgeous landscape shots of the Mongolian countryside, often featuring the green of its natural backdrop rendered opaque by a layer of mist.

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