Kohei Igarashi's wistful opening scene of Venice Days finds a young widower returning to the place where he first met his deceased wife, only to discover that nothing has changed and everything is different.

Five years separate the two halves of “Super Happy Forever,” a delicate, unassuming yet subtly complex reverse-order love story that doesn’t dart between timelines but instead offers the past as a bittersweet chaser into the present. It’s a gap brief enough that little changes at the sleepy Japanese beach resort where the film is set: Faces and places remain largely the same, though melancholy protagonist Sano (Hiroki Sano) may have too much faith in the time-bridging powers of a hotel’s lost-and-found office. One key absence, though, makes any carryover from the past feel like a cruel rebuke to Sano. In Kohei Igarashi’s elegant fourth feature, the suffocating atmosphere of grief precedes our introduction to its object; our grief outpaces Sano’s.

A gentle opening film for this year’s Venice Days program, the mournfully titled “Super Happy Forever” finds Igarashi working in a breezier, more Rohmer-esque register than his 2017 Venice Orizzonti premiere, “The Night I Swam,” a dialogue-free collaboration with talented French maverick Damien Manivel, who returns here as editor and co-producer. This Gallic-Japanese co-production will burnish Igarashi’s reputation on the festival circuit, though it may be too understated for theatrical distribution in many markets—its youthful disposition and quietly formal simplicity make it a viable fit for specialty streaming platforms.

“Was this the room?” asks Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata), Sano’s best friend, as they lounge in a luxurious hotel suite overlooking the coastline of Japan’s Izu Peninsula—all wide, pastel skies and serene lapis lazuli waters. It turns out to be the room they stayed in five years ago, on a vacation far less laden with emotional baggage, and that’s no coincidence. Sullen and withdrawn, Sano is determined to retrace the steps of that journey, as if reenacting the past might somehow give him a second chance. For it was at that same resort, on that carefree vacation, that Sano first met Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto, utterly beguiling), the cheerful, outgoing young woman who would become his wife sometime over the next half decade and then die suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep at another time.