This is the "movie" version of the series of the same name. It follows the lives of two pathetically closeted gay men who are incapable of showing each other even a soupçon of affection, except for the very last nanosecond of the film, where they barely touch fingers to make it clear to the audience that they are a "couple."
Shiro is a lawyer and Kenji is a hairdresser. They live their dull lives in a modest apartment where they spend a lot of time talking about food, and where Shiro shows off his culinary skills, sometimes with the help of a gay-friendly female acquaintance.
There is a lot of cutesy music, and once it's introduced, you can be sure it will be heard again, as obviously there was a limited budget for music and the cues are repeated ad nauseam.
I understand that this film is based on the TV series which was based on a popular manga, so, perhaps the story is doing justice to the original concept, I don't know. But even if it was, you would think that after doing a complete TV series where the biggest physical thing the actors were asked to do was to fake a kiss which faded out before it could be completed, maybe something more than touching hands was called for.
Yes, there were funny moments. Yes, the actors do a good job of doing what is asked of them. The majority of the supporting characters were irritating, obnoxious, loud and useless. The only two people in the film, other than the leads (who both have charm and understand humor) were the man who was in jail (a side story that showed Shiro's "lawyering" skills) and the woman who played Shiro's mother -- who seemed authentic, warm, sensitive and kind.
As a gay man who is in a long term relationship with a Japanese man, I applaud anyone for attempting to show a middle-aged Japanese gay couple go through their daily life. And despite Kenji basically being a slightly queeny stereotypical hairdresser, and despite Shiro being the heavily closeted "straight" gay man, they had their appeal.
But for reasons only known to the producers, writer and director, they were not allowed to hug or kiss or put their arms around each other. And if they were in fact a couple, in the privacy of their own home, they'd naturally touch each other, and I mean, hug, hold, embrace. The idea that these two men had ever or would ever have sex is scrubbed clean from the story. So, yes, it's great to have some gay characters on the screens in Japan, but it's not great to reduce them to one-dimensional puppets that the creative team used to wring laughs out of the audience.
0 out of 0 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
