I think my main gripe with this movie is adult Taeko's face. I found her unsettling to look at in nearly every scene, it was immensely distracting. They also do a lot of exaggerated smiles for the male lead (Toshio), but it works better on his face.
I don't understand why they drew adult Taeko's cheekbones like that. It's an odd artistic decision. It makes sense on the face of a much older woman, and indeed, some of the elderly women in the movie have it too. It works on their faces. It makes them look older.
Adult Taeko is not old. She's youthful, and so the cheekbones being emphasised at the bottom like that don't make sense. She looked like her surgeon botched her cheek fillers. I can't stress it enough, she did not look right. It only get worse whenever she smiled, which happens very frequently. Her smile is borderline creepy.
Young Taeko looks exceedingly normal in comparison. I actually couldn't put together how such a regular looking child could grow up into such an unsettling looking adult. If the unusual cheekbones were fully natural, wouldn't she have had evidence of them in childhood already? Wouldn't some of her family members have shared such a pronounced facial trait? At the very least, she would have had her creepy smile already. But young Taeko doesn't have the creepy cheekbone-bulgeing grin. Her expressions are mostly somber and shy, with some cute moments thrown in.
Because the two don't look like each other, I didn't feel like they were connected. The movie's storyline does little to mitigate this. Young Taeko is willful, sensitive and creative - a true romantic at heart. Her parents and siblings do their level best to crush this out of her. They look down on her any chance they get, ridicule her and verbally degrade her. Overall I did not get the impression anyone in her family liked her.
Adult Taeko seems lonely, self-conscious and odd. She is still a romantic, and is still looked down upon by her family, because she's single at twenty-seven. And she leaves her boss under the impression that she has a boyfriend. So she's self-conscious about that, since she's lying by omission. She also tells the male lead how common it is for women her age to still be single, and says all her friends back in Tokyo are. Does adult Taeko actually have friends back in Tokyo? We don't meet them.
I can see how a child that was suppressed and mistreated as much as Taeko would grow up into a weird adult. But that framing is missing from the movie entirely. Instead adult Taeko endlessly goes into monologues about "funny" moments from her childhood, that are actually just depressing, and then insists it's a charming story when her audience looks upset. That part is realistic. Abused people often don't realise they were abused, until they see the horrified expressions of their listeners.
But the movie doesn't frame it that way. Instead Taeko tells a young teen who is frequently being slapped by her father that maybe that situation is preferable to being hit only once, the way Taeko was. She never comes to the realisation that she was hit by her family over and over, just not with hands. She never confronts her family, not even internally. She just keeps spinning miserable tales of disappointment and alienation from her childhood. For the entirety of the movie.
I wish they hadn't applied that story-telling technique for the entire two hours. If there had been one or two flashbacks, the point in the present day story could already have been made. That life is full of disappointments, and then you become tougher, gain perspective, and keep going anyways. But, no. Half the movie is devoted to meandering vignettes that have a tenuous connection with the present day. I did enjoy them on some level, because young Taeko is an adorable child. But it was hard watching this sweet little kid getting mistreated over and over, with no narrative purpose besides "that was then, now is now, disillusionment is a natural part of life".
The only positive and cute thing that happens to young Taeko is that she develops her first crush. That's never followed up on. Romance is an important theme in the movie, but young Taeko's crush storyline ends abruptly. We don't know if that boy became her first boyfriend, if it partially informed her adult outlook on relationships, nothing. It could've been an interesting deeper look into why the character is single when she clearly doesn't want to be, it could've connected the younger and older version.
All the countryside people are nearly wholly devoid of personality. They're all kind, to an unrealistic level, and nothing else. The countryside itself is painted as intensely idyllic. That does make some sense, if we're observing it the way Taeko is, because she heavily romanticises this life. But it makes her time there boring. She does something that delights her, like watching a sunrise, she talks about herself a lot, repeat repeat repeat.
So now we have two somewhat boring and repetitive halves to the movie.
Towards the end of the movie, a local farmer grandmother confirms that Taeko is not complete unless she marries someone. That she can't just be in the country because she romanticises it, and feels lost in her own life in the city. Her time there should lead somewhere. Toshio likes her, so obviously, they should get married.
Taeko feels intensely embarrassed by this suggestion, because she feels like it exposes the fact that she's a fraud. She has no opinions about the countryside besides shallow ones, and she has never considered Toshio as a romantic interest.
She runs off, stands in the middle of a bridge in the rain, and nearly gets run over by Toshio. They sit in his car for a while, and she tells another depressing story from her childhood. She admits that she fakes being nice, and actually holds a lot of negative feelings.
Toshio reframes it for her, and makes her realise that the boy she thought must hate her because he could see through her, actually liked her. I think we're meant to draw a parallel to Toshio's feelings about her. Which she seems to realise on the train home during the credit roll, because she immediately returns to continue her conversation with Toshio, and probably actually get to know him as a romantic prospect.
Which means the most cathartic moment of the movie is vagued across the credits. I know this is a stylistic choice that Ghibli employs more often, but I found it especially frustrating in this movie. After all that tedium, there's finally a tiny bit of catharsis, and we don't get to hear any of Taeko's thoughts or words on it. We're shut out and left to draw our own conclusions based on what we're seeing.
I sincerely hope she didn't move to the countryside to be with Toshio. It would be a cheap conclusion to a narrative about internal exploration and making peace with yourself and the past.
Overall, this movie put me off and left me feeling narratively robbed.
You know whose story I would've loved to actually find out more about? Taeko's older sister Yaeko, who had a massive crush on a Takarazuka revue actress, which is a classic phase for a queer teenager (me included). It's so rare for Ghibli to feature a queer-coded moment that isn't accidental or reversed at a later point in the story, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Taeko loves the theatre too, it would've been interesting to see a story developed about her getting to know her sister better that way during her college years, while she pursued her interest in it. But we learn nothing of present-day Yaeko.
