An average movie

I had no idea what to expect from this flick but since it was directed by Anh Hung Tran, I was quite eager to check it out. To be honest, I can’t believe it was the first movie I have seen from this director in the last 20 years (on the other hand, he has directed only 3 movies in the meantime). Well, first of all, I thought it was very brave from Tran Anh Hung, a Vietnamese director who spent most of his youth in France, to direct a Japanese movie. Unfortunately, even if the damned thing was, as usual with this director, visually really neat, I’m afraid it still didn’t really work though. Eventually, what was this movie about after all? Basically, it was about a young student who had the bad luck to fall in love with 2 very difficult girls. The first one, Naoko (very well played by Rinko Kikuchi), at least, had the excuse that she had been highly traumatised by the suicide of her first love, Kizuki, who happened to be also the best friend of the main character. Unfortunately, these characters were introduced within the 5 minutes only by voice-over and , by that point, Kizuki was actually already dead. As a result, this movie really suffered from the fact that the relationship between these 3 characters was never properly fleshed out from the start. With Midori, the other girl the main character fell in love with, it was even trickier as she was basically an annoying tease, at least, as far as I was concerned. Especially when she tried to explain what love meant for her, I thought it was just so infuriating and I actually felt like slapping the damned girl. The funny thing was that, I kept thinking about it and I came to the conclusion that, in fact, my wife more or less thinks the same way (even if she would completely deny it if I would ask her). So, there was some truth in this character but it didn’t change the fact that she was still borderline obnoxious. Eventually, the problem with this movie was that none of the characters was properly developed so I had a hard time to care about any of them. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Anh Hung Tran’s work.