Review: When the Light Breaks and Renoir

Posted on June 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

Often when tragedy strikes we are unprepared for it. The work of addressing it thus becomes fraught with circumstance and time seems to press in like a great weight. There’s no time to stand back and collect your faculties. The Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson knows how to convey this feeling, though he’s greatly helped by his actors, who miraculously remain in the cinematic moment, presumably take after take after take. Unfolding from one dusk to another, the movie pegs its temporal effect on the way Iceland’s sky changes color and mood over the course of a full day. We open with university students Una (Elín Hall) and Diddi (Baldur Einarsson) sitting at the edge of the water watching the sun set, their affection for each other palpable and deep. “Let’s make babies together,” Diddi says offhandedly, but the intent is clear, and strikingly tender. They walk home and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

There is already a measure of discomfort in the interaction, because in the morning Diddi is fly to his home town, where he will break up with his girlfriend. Over the course of this eventful day, we will learn that Una and Diddi’s romance has been long gestating; that they started out as bandmates at their school and eventually fell in love. But because he has maintained a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), the tryst is hidden from almost all Diddi’s and Una’s acquaintances except Diddi’s brother, Gunni (Mikael Kaaber). On the way to the airport, Diddi’s taxi is involved in a tunnel fire that kills many motorists, including him. By the time Una wakes up it has become a national tragedy. Now, she is yet another member of the mourning party of people who knew Diddi. When Klara arrives later that day, devastated, how is Una to handle it? At first she avoids the other woman as if by instinct, but it’s no use. Klara knows that Una was close to Diddi without understanding the true nature of that closeness, and she is intractably drawn to her. 

Through a day of compensatory but somehow celebratory drinking, Diddi’s friends deal with his loss while Rúnarsson keeps his focus on Una. The viewer is privy to how each emotionally charged human response to the tragedy affects her and her hesitantly budding friendship with Klara, and the development offers both tension and release, usually at the same time. The movie is all amorphous feeling, like something conceived through the filter of a hangover, and by the next sunset Una and Klara have forged a connection born not of grief but of spiritual kinship. They know things about Diddi his other friends and family never could, and thus they know each other.

The death of someone close to the protagonist also figures prominently in Chie Hayakawa’s second feature, Renoir. The protagonist is an 11-year-old girl, Fuki (Yui Suzuki), and the death is that of her father, Keiji (Lily Franky), though it is slow and drawn out since he has terminal cancer. Just as Rúnarsson tried to show how people react to a loved one’s sudden death, Hayakawa explores how people get used to the idea of a known impending one. As it stands, Fuki is left to pursue her own interests, regardless of how frivolous they are, as her working mother (Hikari Ishida) is busy moving her father in and out of the hospital. Death is not an abstraction to Fuki, but something that must be gotten through, and Renoir is essentially a study in adolescent distraction. 

The movie is at least partly autobiographical and set during the heady days of the 80s bubble, but unlike a lot of Japanese directors Hayakawa doesn’t rub your nose in it. Nostalgic touches are kept to a minimum so as to concentrate on a young girl’s keeping her head as her family loses theirs. Set against her mother’s need for emotional stability and her father’s desire for physical stasis, Fuki is free to form her own connections, whether through a potentially dangerous dating hotline, a rich classmate with family problems of their own, or her English teacher, who recognizes something special in the girl, something the audience is meant to recognize as well. She is also free to fantasize about better things, but that goes without saying for someone her age.

Though the movie is eventful in an episodic way, its slow pacing stalls the overall momentum. When death arrives it’s a relief, a response that’s natural given how tortuous Keiji’s treatment had become, but one that leaves Fuki in a conundrum Hayakawa can barely conjure. Unlike her debut work, the chillingly prescient Plan 75, which confronted death from a much different perspective, Renoir feels overly cautious and tentative, as if the director doesn’t entirely trust what she remembered.

When the Light Breaks, in Icelandic, opens June 20 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Renoir, in Japanese, opens June 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Euro Space (03-3461-0211).

When the Light Breaks home page in Japanese

Renoir home page in Japanese

When the Light Breaks photo (c) Compass Films & Halibut, in coproduction with Revolver Amsterdam, MP Filmska Produccija, Eaux Vives Productions, Jour2Fete, with The Party Film Sales

Renoir photo (c) 2025 Renoir Seisaku Iinkai + International Partners

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Review: Megalopolis

Posted on June 18, 2025 by philipbrasor

Given the often self-contradicting comments attending Francis Ford Coppola’s late-career magnum opus since its premiere at Cannes last year, it’s difficult to determine if anyone thinks it’s a movie with “appeal.” Though not nearly as long as it could have been, the movie’s multiple storylines and complex themes makes the two-hour-plus running time feel like a chore, even for arthouse freaks. The general opinion is that it’s good in that it’s ambitious and well-made, but hardly a classic in the way one might think a Coppola late-career magnum opus should be. Though no one expects another Godfather or Apocalypse Now, Coppola has made some good movies since the 70s, and this comes across as merely a huge project without many elements that stick in the imagination.

The central hangup is the fantasy-derived nature of the story. Set in an alternative version of New York called New Rome, the film relies on allegory that is heavily representational right from the start, centered on a Howard Roark-like architect, Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), whose vision is grand, self-inflating, and at odds with the conventional sensibilities of the powers-that-be, including the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), and the city’s reigning billionaire Robert Moses type, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Catalina has visions of greatness that he believes mere mortals cannot comprehend and thus is unremitting in his determination to see them realized, but for the most part the obstacles in his way are tabloidy in texture: sex scandals, inter-family squabbles that turn murderous, and pots of money being spilled all over the place. Apropos the city’s name, decadence is the default narrative mode, and each elaborately designed character stands for some facet of civilizational decline. There are plots and subplots that make sense, but they aren’t coordinated so much as attached to pre-existing literary ideas, including bits of Hamlet and pseudo-hippie tracts like Siddhartha. If the big problem is that the establishment doesn’t want to recognize Catalina’s genius, then there has to be better ways to convey that genius than long, grammatically correct soliloquys. 

It’s thus hard to recommend as a movie, even if much of it is visually fantastic and dramatically intriguing. There’s a lot of money up there on the screen and it shows, and the cast alone may be worth your while just to see how all these actors deal with their weird characters and knotty lines. In addition to the aforementioned stars there’s Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzmann, and even Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire (playing Jon Voight’s mother!). If you think of it as a spectacle rather than a film, you’re halfway to deciding whether you might want to see it. 

Opens June 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Megalopolis home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Caesar Film LLC

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Review: Gone With the Boat and How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

Posted on June 13, 2025 by philipbrasor

The topic of how to address an elderly parent’s impending death is common in Asian arthouse cinema, and there are very few new angles from which to approach it. Chinese director Chen Xiaoyu’s debut feature, Gone With the Boat, takes matters slowly and cautiously, and while it’s affecting in its own quiet way it doesn’t make any kind of distinct impression. The elderly person in question is 72-year-old Zhou Jin (Ge Zhaomei), who has lived by herself in a riverside village since her carpenter husband recently died and seems entirely self-sufficient. She has two adult children, the tense, ambitious Jenny (Liu Dan), who runs an English language school in Shanghai with her American husband; and Qin (We Zhoukai), who doesn’t seem to have any kind of fixed job or residence. They rarely visit their mother, and when they do they don’t stay long. But once Jin is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor they are forced to face their filial responsibilities and be by her side, choices that invariably lead to friction, not only with their mother, but with each other.

Initially the conflict is over their mother’s treatment. Jenny wants Jin to take advantage of aggressive methods, but Jin sees it as being pointless and would prefer dying at home. Qin takes his mother’s side, and the two siblings alternate staying with Jin as she enters her final weeks, though Jenny’s school is having serious financial problems that demand her attention. Qin has no such obstacles and nothing better to do, and so he spends the bulk of his time with Jin. Gradually, Chen reveals the source of the family’s troubled interrelationships. There was an older son who died young, plunging his parents into remorse over how they forced him to take over the father’s business, and so they encouraged their two later children to go out into the world. Moreover, Jin was either orphaned or given up by her parents to an adoptive family, who expected her to marry their son when she was old enough, but wed another instead. Consequently, she has never had a family to fall back on—her adoptive brother visits, intent on putting Jin’s affairs in order, but she rejects his help—and has only her children, grandchildren, and the house she made into a home. She wants a simple funeral, a wish that perplexes her neighbors. 

Chen does a good job of weaving these various personal enmities into a believable family saga, and maintains enough mystery to keep the viewer intrigued. Qin seems to have a constitutional repulsion to marriage (it’s hinted he might be gay); and Jenny is estranged from her older teenage son, who left school and home to pursue a career as an actor, with the implication that his father is not the same man as the father of Jenny’s younger daughter, Sue. As a leitmotif, the director makes frequent references to the boats required by residents of the village, as if they provided more stability than an actual house. It’s an odd metaphor for a movie that’s so formally stolid and narratively inert. 

Thai director Pat Boonnitipat’s How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is, as suggested by its title, a less serious movie about the same subject, though in its own way it really isn’t that different. Opening in a comic mode with various family members kissing up to their widowed matriarch, Grandma Menju (Usha “Taew” Seamkhum), who owns a nice piece of property in the Chinatown section of Bangkok, the story sets up a classic cynical dilemma: Who deserves to inherit her legacy? From the get-go it appears that the least likely benefactor would be her college dropout grandson, M (Putthipong “Billkin” Assaratanakul), whose interest in life starts and ends with his collection of video games. Boonnitipat’s aims are made clear by how he presents the various family members. Everyone, including M’s parents, cousins (one of whom makes a living through Only Fans), uncles, and aunts, present themselves as worthy heirs. Grandma, who is good-natured to a fault, takes it all in stride. M has designs, but he keeps them hidden.

Invariably, the other shoe drops and M tells Grandma that she has cancer, a diagnosis everyone else has kept hidden from her. Impressed by his candor, Grandma takes more interest in M to her other relatives’ chagrin, and M moves in as a full-time caregiver. For a time, M’s mercenary mission seems obvious, especially to the other family members, but as he gets closer to Grandma and learns her story he inadvertently sees what kind of a world exists beyond the computer screen and can’t help but get caught up in it. Consequently, he draws closer to Grandma than either of her own two children, M’s striving mother Sew (Sarinrat “Jear” Thomas) and gambling-addicted Uncle Kiang (Sanya “Duu” Kunakurn). 

Boonnitipat uses M’s naivete to show the audience this world, which is not that different from the one conveyed in Gone With the Boat, but the director expresses a much keener enthusiasm for his images and sounds, and the movie makes this corner of the Thai capital, with its rich ethnic heritage and unique history, vivid and fascinating. Though predictably sentimental—it is one of the decade’s highest-grossing films not only in Thailand but throughout Southeast Asia—it’s also rigorously honest about the process of dying slowly. We know M will somehow reap the inheritance his relatives covet, but by actually being present, emotionally as well as physically, he realizes what that legacy is worth and acts conscientiously, not only toward his grandmother, but to everyone else in his family, whether they like it or not.

Gone With the Boat, in Chinese and English, now playing in Tokyo at Grand Cinema Sunshine Ikebukuro (03-6915-2722).

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, in Thai, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Gone With the Boat home page in Japanese

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies home page in Japanese

Gone With the Boat photo (c) 2023 Fractal Star Film Production Co., Ltd., Infinina Media Co., Ltd.

How to Make Millions Before Granma Dies photo (c) 2024 GDH 559 Co., Ltd.

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Review: Amerikatsi

Posted on June 12, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though American in tone, the plot mechanics of this nominally Armenian feature scan Eastern European to a fault. Tragedy is played for laughs, at least at first, while the characters are shamelessly played as broad stereotypes that reinforce the black comic mode. The hero is a classic schlub, and, in fact, is nicknamed Charlie Chaplin by his tormentors as more than just an insult. His name actually is Charlie, and as played by Armenian-American writer-director Michael Goorjian, he’s preternatually naive. It’s 1948, and Stalin has invited all Armenians who escaped the World War I Turkish-led genocide to repatriate in what is now Soviet territory. Charlie, an orphan who was smuggled out of Armenia as a little boy and made it to the U.S., has recently lost his wife and takes Stalin up on his offer, expecting to reclaim his heritage. He arrives with only a smattering of the language and, in the train station, helps a woman retrieve her son who has gotten lost in a crowd of people. The woman happens to be the Armenian wife of a local Russian official, and she asks her husband to help Charlie get a job. Instead, the husband, miffed by this stranger’s grating American attitude, no matter how benign the intent, has him arrested and thrown in prison.

Fooled into signing a confession he can’t read, Charlie is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia but, due to damage caused by a fortuitous earthquake, all prisoners set for transfer are kept on site to repair the walls. Charlie settles into a daily grind of backbreaking work and occasional beatings meted out just for the hell of it. To pass the time, he sits at the window of his cell and spies on the neighbors, a young couple the husband of which is one of the tower guards at the prison and who has a knack for painting that his wife doesn’t seem to appreciate. It’s like a kinder version of Rear Window: Over months and even years, Charlie’s fascination with this couple turns into an obsession, as he loses himself in the drama of their everyday existence, even if he has to make up his own dialogue. The script is just clever enough to paper over the more obvious plot holes and contradictions, and Goorjian knows how to modulate the emotional temperature to keep the viewer interested, but if you’ve seen any Eastern European tragicomedies of this ilk you can predict not only where the story is going, but how it will get there, and the last half hour, while compelling, feels often like a retread of something that was probably better. 

The film is saved by its skillful editing and the supporting Armenian and Russian cast, whose caricatures turn out to be deeper than what first impressions might imply, especially in the way they differentiate between the two national outlooks. The old guy who constantly lectures Charlie on the greatness of Armenian culture is a running joke that never flags. 

In Armenian, Russian and English. Opens June 13 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Amerikatsi home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 People of AR Productions and The New Armenian LLC

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Review: Love in the Big City

Posted on June 11, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though it’s the usual stylish froth you would expect from a mainstream Korean movie featuring two of the country’s most popular stars, Love in the Big City manages to make a timely statement about the state of affairs for young Koreans with regard to dating and romantic commitment. The two main characters are stereotypical fictional constructs in their own way, but their interactions say something significant about the local brand of toxic masculinity and how it affects the lives of people who simply want to live their lives as they please. The female lead, Jae-hee (Kim Go-eun), is privileged and free-spirited in a way that grates on her fellow university classmates, especially the boys, who find her less than solicitous to their sensibilities. The only one who seems unmoved by her sassy attitude and flouting of social norms is Heung-soo (Noh Sang-hyun), who at first seems slightly annoyed. Eventually we learn that he really doesn’t care that much, because he’s gay.

A closeted gay, of course, an attribute that’s the film’s dramatic centerpiece. Both Jae-hee and Heung-soo are majoring in French literature, and they quickly bond over their interpretation of Camus, a writer who they admire for his iconoclasm. This common interest draws them together and Jae-hee, being both sensitive and nosey, almost immediately realizes Heung-soo is homosexual and is thus even more drawn to him as a friend and fellow non-conformist. Eventually, she invites him to move into her flat, where they create their own kind of semi-impoverished bohemia. The close juxtaposition of their lives puts each in stark contrast to the other’s. Though both are a little too fond of alcohol—Love in the Big City has even more scenes of bingeing than the average Korean feature—they manifest the loss of inhibition differently. Jae-hee would be called sexually profligate in a Western movie, though here she’s mostly just romantically indiscreet, and tends to hook up with guys who can’t handle her candor. Heung-soo is constitutionally paranoid about anyone finding out about his sexual proclivities, and keeps his affairs closely concealed, especially from his mother, who suspects her son’s leanings but refuses to accept them. Heung-soo’s disposition with regard to his sexuality has the opposite effect on his relationships than Jae-hee’s does for hers—he rejects lovers who get too close even when their intentions are sincere and understanding. He just can’t risk it.

Matters come to a head when one of Jae-hee’s boyfriends discovers she is living with Heung-soo, thinking at first that they are secret lovers and thus forcing Jae-hee to reveal that Heung-soo “doesn’t like women,” a statement that turns Heung-soo against her. It’s at this point where what has been implied becomes obvious: Jae-hee and Heung-soo can only be friends in this rarefied world they’ve created, a world that’s automatically delineated by Heung-soo’s fear of being outed. A friend told me that, in terms of social content, Korean films are about 20 years behind the West, and this movie would seem to confirm that opinion, but the central relationship, while steeped in cliches requisite for big budget Korean love stories, is so finely calibrated and the actors so invested in their roles that the movie’s statement hits home. Love in the Big City also projects optimism by showing how the two roommates move beyond their codependency into responsible maturity. 

In Korean. Opens June 13 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Love in the Big City home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Plus M Entertainment and Showbox Corp.

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Review: Thelma

Posted on June 6, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though the central dilemma posed by this action film should be significant for Japanese viewers—an elderly woman is scammed out of a large amount of money by a telephone caller pretending to represent her grandson, who the caller says has been arrested—the cultural distinctions may cause consternation. The freedom with which the title character, played by 94-year-old actor of the moment, June Squibb, goes about her daily routine points up a measure of independence that may feel somewhat alien to Japanese seniors, but I would venture to guess Thelma’s circumstances are invented in such a way so as to make the action prerogatives at least halfway believable. The film’s depiction of the differences between living by oneself in one’s own home and living in a facility should be taken with a grain of salt. Japanese viewers might find it fantastical. 

Director Josh Margolin is more concerned with adapting the conventional revenge narrative to the situation of the post-AARP crowd, and he demonstrates enough imagination in that regard to keep you interested without forcing you to consider how preposterous it all is. Thanks to Squibb, Thelma’s reaction to finding out she’s been had feels both correct and slightly batty—she’s the kind of old lady who would never raise her voice but will always make sure she understands what’s going on in order to make her point. So when the police tell her there’s little they can do to get her $10,000 back, she flips her wig, figuratively speaking, and gets to work trying to figure out who the fraudsters are. Margolin gets a lot of mileage out of her relationship to the slacker grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), who loves his grandma and mostly relies on her for economic succor, mainly by lending her his expertise with modern digital life. He’s essentially the tech geek that every crime movie of this ilk requires, but in this case he’s serving an avenger who not only isn’t savvy with devices but is constitutionally against them (“Technology is what got us into this mess in the first place”). But because Thelma is forced to do the leg work herself, she has to improvise much more than John Wick does, and therein lies the movie’s implacable charm. Recruiting her old person’s home-bound best friend, Ben (the late Richard Roundtree—the original Shaft!), mainly for use of his motorized cart but also for emotional backup, she penetrates the criminals’ lair with savvy and moxie, and finds that the motivations for cheating old people are more complicated than they seem on the surface. But, in any event, she gets hers.

As an action movie, Thelma is, by necessity, slower and more deliberate, and it’s in that style where most of the humor is invested. It’s not just age that keeps Thelma from going ballistic (“I move from point to point”), even when she’s brandishing a firearm; but once she’s riled up no one can keep her down, not even Malcolm McDowell, who plays the heavy with a wink, a scowl, and his own batch of senior health issues. He’s the perfect foil for the old dame. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Thelma home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Pictures

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Review: MaXXXine

Posted on June 5, 2025 by philipbrasor

Director Ti West and his acting collaborator, Mia Goth, have managed to accrue enough hip cachet with their porn/slasher hybrid trilogy to attract a higher class of supporting cast: Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, Elizabeth Debicki, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monaghan, and even Halsey do grunt work as colorful side characters in the concluding chapter of the series, which sees the 70s-80s adult film star, Maxine Minx (Goth), attempt to scale the Hollywood heights by getting cast in a sleazy establishment-certified horror film being directed by a haughty Brit auteur with visions of John Carpenter crossover grandeur, albeit in the opposite direction. Since MaXXXine is pure, shameless 80s pastiche, there isn’t a whole lot of aesthetic and subtextual distance between what this auteur, Elizabeth Bender (Debicki), is trying to do and what West accomplishes with tongue stuffed implacably in cheek, which gives the viewer pause: Is West making fun of me? I guess you’d have to ask someone who was fully awake to the cultural charms of the 80s, because I mostly slept-walked through the decade.

Maxine, you’ll remember, was the only survivor of the porn production in the first movie, X, that was set upon by the psychotic old lady (also played by Goth), who, as we learned in the second part of the trilogy, Pearl, was sent over the edge when her own dreams of youthful stardom were railroaded by men who only wanted sex. Maxine, now ensconsed successfully in L.A.’s sex business underground (she drives a vintage Mercedes), attempts to break out, but there is a shadowy figure stalking her who knows what happened at Pearl’s farm back in Texas. Is this figure the Night Stalker serial killer who’s all over the news? Does his threat to expose her dirty secret through his private dick proxy (Bacon) have any traction? It’s difficult to say, since Maxine is conceived as such a badass, both socially and professionally, that you can only assume the stalker really doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. 

But that would be assuming too much, because West’s script is so flimsy in terms of motivation and premise-building that you can’t tell where the 80s slasher parody ends and the clever sendup of Hollywood attitude starts. It’s not so much the grotty special effects and the cheesy hard rock guitar score, which are fun in their own diminished way, but rather the sense that West and Goth don’t really seem to have any original ideas of their own. Unlike X, which at least made an effort to scope the close kinship between porn and horror, MaXXXine has nothing on offer except winking jokes about how everyone in L.A. is a failed Hollywood bizzer, including the actual bizzers themselves. Had West focused on that aspect of the movie industry, he might have made something truly terrifying.

Opens June 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

MaXXXine home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Starmaker Rights LLC

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Review: We Live in Time

Posted on June 4, 2025 by philipbrasor

The prerogatives of the romantic tragedy get a solid workout in this over-ambitious tale of a young heterosexual couple trying to have a child as the female partner struggles with cancer. The first thing that points up director John Crowley’s determination to make this weepie significant is the way he presents the timeline out of sequence, a not particularly original idea and one that effectively blunts the more melodramatic elements of the script. Perhaps that was his intention, but as a result the movie can’t quite work up sufficient emotional momentum. The story as it’s styled lacks surprises. 

Nevertheless, there is real chemistry between the principals, Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield). When they meet, the latter is just finishing up divorce proceedings with his first wife, a matter that I would have liked to know more about because Tobias seems awfully young to be exiting a failed marriage. Almut is already a celebrated chef-in-the-making in London, while Tobias shuffles about as a breakfast cereal salesman; a contrast that Crowley also handles maladroitly. Though it would be patronizing to call Almut some kind of superwoman, she definitely has it all over Tobias in terms of drive, talent, and common sense. The point seems to be that she loves him for the earnest everyman he comes across as, because she tends to deal with high flyers in her professional life. Moreover, she gave up a promising career as a competitive figure skater for cooking, which she says she loves more. Tobias, on the other hand, exists in a constant funk of under-achievement and can barely express his feelings. Crowley emphasizes this divide with standalone episodes that are narratively brilliant but dramatically redundant: Almut taking part in a televised cooking competition while suffering the acute ravages of chemotherapy; Almut giving birth in a dirty gas station because on the way to the hospital they get stuck in traffic; Tobias crashing Almut’s baby shower to apologize profusely for a recent faux pas. In the end, you wonder how much Tobias is really holding Almut back, even as she trusts him to raise their daughter alone in the event that she succumbs to her ongoing illness.

I suppose that’s an irony designed to deepen the tragedy and the love story, but due to the out-of-sequence exposition it never makes a distinct impression. You invariably react to such gambits intellectually rather than sentimentally, and though I’m always suspicious of sentiment for its own sake, you can’t appreciate a story like this without falling victim to it.

Opens June 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

We Live in Time home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Studiocanal SAS-Channel Four Television Corporation

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Media watch: Koreans reconsider unwed parenthood

Posted on June 1, 2025 by philipbrasor

Last Friday, the Japanese Diet took up the issue of separate names for married couples for the first time in 28 years. Though the debate about bessei—allowing partners who wed to retain their individual birth surnames rather than forcing them to choose one—has been around for the last 30 years at least, the topic has not been discussed in the national assembly owing to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s stubborn refusal to countenance any change to family law, saying that allowing separate surnames would undermine the integrity of the Japanese family, despite the fact that almost every other country in the world allows married couples to use separate names legally and the Japanese business community, which is hardly a bastion of liberal thought, has urged the government to change the Civil Code to permit separate names. 

The bill that would change the law is being sponsored by the opposition, which is no guarantee it will pass, but the fact that the matter is being discussed brings the possibility as close to reality as it’s ever been. One aspect that will likely be covered in the debate is the effect the bill would have on Japan’s notoriously low birth rate. Many couples do not marry simply because they want to retain their birth names, and thus if they have children as common law couples those children will be deemed illegitimate in the family register and thus in the eyes of the authorities, a status that still carries a stigma. 

According to an April 21 article in the Tokyo Shimbun, a survey conducted by an organization called Asuniwa, which is lobbying for passage of the bessei bill, found that about “half the people nationwide who would be affected by the bill’s passage,” meaning, presumably, people in common law relationships, said they would legally register their union if it does pass. More significantly, 60 percent of this demographic who are in their 20s said they would marry. The survey, which was conducted in March, was complied by Keio University Associate Professor Yuichiro Sakai, who told Tokyo Shimbun that he received responses from 1,600 people in common law relationships and unattached singles, and 49.1 percent said they would be willing to marry if the bill passes. By applying this rate to the general population, within which he calculates 1.226 million people are currently in common law relationships, that means passage of the bill could result in some 587,000 people becoming legally wed who are not wed right now. About 30 percent of the respondents cited “I don’t want to change my name” as the reason for not being married. 

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Review: Dream Girl: The Making of Marilyn Monroe

Posted on May 31, 2025 by philipbrasor

We hardly need another film document about Marilyn Monroe, and the bizarre tone of the English narration here could indicate that A.I. may have had something to do with its creation. Then there’s the movie’s aggressive tabloidy approach, which takes for granted the notion that the late actor did not commit suicide or succumb to an accidental overdose but rather was murdered by mob boss Joe Giancana as payback/warning to the Kennedys. Though it evinces sympathy for Monroe, its coldly analytical methodology feels harsh, as if the A.I. software were prompted by a central concept that attempted to get at the heart of the actor’s everlasting mystique by plumbing her ambition, which is suggested by the title itself. Though the narrative mentions all the men who used her for their own ends, the thesis is that Norma Jean Dougherty could never have become Marilyn Monroe without her own peculiar drive to be a movie star on terms that were not yet acceptable to Hollywood. In a sense, she forced herself on an industry that wasn’t ready for her and in doing so probably changed that industry more than any other single player.

The annoying voiceover, credited to the director, Ian Ayres, alternates with talking head interviews from the past, mostly with people who knew her intimately but weren’t famous themselves. These figures are only too happy to reveal the sordid circumstances behind Norma Jean’s upbringing—the illegitimacy, the foster homes, the abuse both sexual and emotional—and while countless other bios have raked over these stories, here they are presented so matter-of-factly as to suggest they weren’t unique to Norma Jean, which is probably true and thus more pertinent to how she sought to cope with her pain by seeking public approval on a grand scale. Her sexual escapades are presented as being common sensical rather than sordid, a perspective that glibly highlights the French provenance of the production. Monroe’s infamous inability to maintain professionalism on set—she was notoriously late to shoots and often forgot her lines—is offset by her uncanny talent for knowing exactly what the camera wanted from her at the moment. Many of the insiders interviewed explain how she seemed inept on a sound stage only to present layers of meaning in the daily rushes. To the film’s credit, it links this capability to her first acting coach, a French woman with whom she had a love affair, and her experience with the Actor’s Studio. In other words, she was a serious student who just had self-esteem problems, which probably describes almost every actor in the business, but Marilyn Monroe may have been the first movie star to use this dynamic to her advantage. 

The upshot, according to the movie, is that Monroe mostly acted on instinct rather than intellect, which may not be a novel analysis but takes into consideration the sexual politics of the era: There was never a time when she could fully assert her independence in the face of crushing male solicitude, and the parade of big swinging dicks who led her to both fame and doom represents a more complete picture of how her world operated. Norman Mailer is never mentioned in the movie, but his book has become the de facto Rosetta Stone for Marilyn studies, and he was as much a trooper in that parade as anyone. As flawed as Dream Girl is, as a documentary it’s a helpful corrective. 

In English and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Dream Girl home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023-French Connection Films

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