Yukisada Isao’s film brings the formulas of the Japanese romantic drama up to date, without changing their essential features. Its lovers are young, pure and doomed, just as similar fictional pairs have been for centuries. Its setting is a picturesque little seaside town that looks as though it might belong in a Yoshinaga Sayuri movie, circa 1965. Too old-fashioned for today’s trendy young? Not really - they helped make the film the biggest domestic hit of 2004, grossing more than $80 million.
Yukisada, who once made low-budget films about twentysomethings in love (Seventh Anniversary, Open House), still has an indie sensibility, as well as an unfaked sympathy for his young characters. Their dilemmas may be clichés, but he creates intimate moments for them that have a feeling of immediacy and discovery.
The story glides smoothly between the present and 1986, when the main events unfold. The hero, Shotaro (Osawa Takao), is living on autopilot, in a slow, downward spiral - until his fiancee, Ritsuko (Shibasaki Ko) up and leaves him. The reason: an old cassette tape that prompts disturbing memories - and a trip to their source, the town in Shikoku where she and Shotaro grew up. Following after her, he begins to reminisce about his youth and his love for a girl named Aki.
Switch to the summer of 1986, when Saku (Moriyama Mirai) and Aki (Nagasawa Masami) are second-year high school students. Athletic, vivacious and bright, Aki seems out of reach for the all-too-average Saku. But Aki takes an interest in him - his clunker of a motor scooter is a draw - and Saku is soon in her thrall, though he would rather die than show it. They begin trading lists of likes and dislikes, exchanging audio diaries on cassette tape - and become more than pals. The culmination is a romantic night on an uninhabited island - and a shocking revelation.
Saku realizes that Aki needs him and that he will be there for her, no matter what. But he feels he fails her - and seventeen years later, is still agonizing about what might have been.
The film’s discovery is Nagasawa Masami, a fresh-scrubbed, radiantly smiling beauty of the type that has been making Japanese males weak at the knees since Yoshinaga’s 1960s heyday. As Aki she makes Saku’s love agonies seem, not only credible, but inevitable.