Even though it's a very long movie it doesn't feel overstretched. It is well-paced in its way. The acting is great, the story is nice.
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boerje-s29 July 2021
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OUT_HJH11 February 2021This is a film about one own loss of idealism (AKA ego ideal) and its relationship to love of another person. I don't know a lick of Japanese so the dialog is unknown to me, I just relied on some written summaries in English of the manga to understand what the movie was about. You didn't need to understand the dialog to get the general point. The movie begins with Win Morisaki's character Tsuji who works at a toy manufacturer of water guns as some type of sales rep in an office. He's a pretty boring and uncreative guy from a professional standpoint, he flirts around with a young girl at the office behind his girlfriend's back, a motherly type who loves him more than he does her. He leaves the apartment one insomniac night to head over to the convenience store to find a young woman looking at maps and one of his company's water guns in her basket. He approaches her says something. Here is the beginning of the pair. Later Kaho Tsuchimura's character Ukiyo gets "stuck" in a railroad crossing as her car "breaks down" oddly enough in the worst place to get her killed. She is frantically trying to move the car until Tsuji saves her by pushing the car out of the way of the train. This is a thinly veiled suicide attempt by Ukiyo which we later will see why she had gotten so desperate. Tsuji will be at the same crossroads both literally and figuratively at the end of the movie. Later we see Ukiyo found sleeping outside in a bench like a drunk or homeless person, which tells us that there was more going on in her than what we thought. Tsuji sees her and tries to track her down to her house and finds out she doesn't live there. Tsuji sees her being hassled by some local Yakuza goons and since I don't know the dialog, I'll take a guess that she borrowed from a Yakuza loan shark and now she can't pay it back. This would explain why Tsuji was at the local Yakuza boss's office and the explanation of the weirdo who always is wearing the same suit, looking for Ukiyo. Going into Tsuji's personal life, it seems like he's a man living life half asleep. He's just getting by in life and seems to be living a dull regiment. The reality of it is that he is a man without a internalized ego ideal. He doesn't have strong personal relationships and he has a dulled relationship with reality. Skipping middle of the film details, this unspoken problem is the source of his later collapse near the end of the film where it turns out that the person he was trying to save, Ukiyo, was essentially suffering the same. Both lack a solid ego ideal in their lives. The only difference is that it took being with Ukiyo to get Tsuji to realize he too was the same. It was only until she confessed to him how much she loves him and wants to be with him, does he realized that they both want to grow and create their own shared idealism of love. This is why I think the movie poster is photographed as man and woman looking optimistically towards the unknown future, together. This is a love story for sure as well as a story of how it is important to establish our own idealism within ourselves, even with help from another. Idealism, enlightenment, love, etc has lots of other references in religion and psychoanalysis. In my own personal struggles I noted those dull periods in myself in my youth. It's good movie to see as a couple!