Economic downturns, idiotic fads, bad haircuts, and aimless kids with no future: it's the early 1990s all over again, now and in Nobuhiro Yamashita's new film. Daisuke and Hisako are a young couple more slack-jawed and senseless than angry and restless, slouching out of Tokyo towards Daisuke's backwater home town with a new bad idea: a health drink they hope sells well. Not surprisingly, it doesn't, since even its smell makes people vomit. With a deadpan aesthetic merging Jim Jarmusch's hipster cool and Aki Kaurismaki's celebration of losers, No One's Ark refines Yamashita's specific grasp of the pace of contemporary youth, where just getting out of bed seems like a pointless triumph of the will. Admittedly, Daisuke and Hisako and their friends aren't up to much, but Yamashita makes sure they accomplish it with such an appealing lack of skill or planning that their struggles expand to heartbreaking proportions. Comical throughout, unbearably sad by the end, and with a memorable, untraditionally beautiful cast, No One's Ark positions Yamashita as one of his generation's sharpest, most distinctive voices.