Mirume (played by Ken'ichi Matsuyama from the DEATH NOTE series) is a normal college student. He goes to school, but doesn't seem to be into it too much. One day a new Art teacher, Yuri (Hiromi Nagasaku), shows up and Mirume instantly falls for her, much to the concern of his friend En-chan (Yu Aoi). En-chan is secretly in love with Mirume (and probably has been her entire life), but she's too shy to ever tell him. Mirume appears to consider En-chan as a little sister or maybe even less than that. Either way, he's definitely not into her romantically.Most viewers would probably be turned off by length of the film (137 minutes) compounded with the fact that pretty much the entire film is made up of long, extended shots where the camera never moves, but I loved every second of it. Was director Nami Iguchi channeling Yasujiro Ozu? The direct cut transition shots to static objects like buildings and roads, the limited use of music (including music heard by the characters), the minimalist camerawork, the character driven story and the lack of tracking shots makes me believe the answer would be yes, but we'll probably never know since I can barely find any information online about this film and she hasn't released another film in over 5 years. I find that to be very depressing because I really admired this film and I found myself thinking about it so much afterwards that I actually sat down and watched it again.
Favorite scenes: Yuri getting a drink out of the refrigerator; Mirume blowing up an inflatable mattress; Mirume showing Yuri how to add oil to the space heater; the fountain shot and every single scene with Yu Aoi. She was amazing. I rented this film because I'm a fan of Ken'ichi Matsuyama and ended up becoming a fan of Yu Aoi also. Well there's another 40 or so movies I'm gonna have to watch! =)
Highly recommended.
I like how the title is written on the screen in English but yet the subtitles are still wrong.
