During the opening credits of Japanese Story, wind carries the sand across an Australian desert, to the accompaniment of a Japanese-inspired score. The sequence sets the scene for a film in which cultures don't so much clash as run parallel, united by (if nothing else) the mutability of all things. Written by Alison Tilson and directed by Sue Brooks, Japanese Story is happy to remain small even as it plays out in a widescreen frame against backdrops that seem to go on forever. Never busier and never better, Toni Collette stars as a grumpy geologist unexpectedly burdened with a less-than-plum assignment: accompanying visiting Japanese investor Gotaro Tsunashima wherever he likes. At their first meeting, the two strike each other as familiarly unfamiliar. He's the formal, aloof, suit-clad Japanese executive, while she's every inch the brash, outgoing, independent Australian frontier woman. Yet as his whims take them deeper into the wilderness and their outing turns first into an adventure, then into something like a vacation, they develop a friendship that finds the oldest means available to short-circuit cultural differences. Relying more on the details of her characters' interaction than on major incident, Brooks lets the slow development of her leads' relationship and the gentle rhythms of their sparsely inhabited surroundings set the film's pace. In the midst of barren beauty, Tsunashima and Collette bond as she teaches him to pronounce "desert." They let awkwardness fade into intimacy, then into the kind of easy rapport that the actors make as pleasing to watch as it must be for their characters to experience. All of which contributes to the effectiveness of Japanese Story's wrenching final act, played by Collette with the intensity of lived experience, and staged, like the rest of the film, as a series of found moments meant to illustrate universal truths. When the credits roll and the mood breaks, Japanese Story finally reveals itself as more dewy-eyed than deep, but as long as the mood holds, it holds fast.