Be My Baby

Young Japanese now seldom select their future mates through traditional omiai – formal match-making meetings with both sets of parents present. Far more popular are go-con, informal get-togethers between equal numbers of men and women, most of whom may be total strangers to each other. For some reason, the most common combination is three men and three women, though this number can be flexible, as One Hitoshi shows in his ensemble dramedy Be My Baby. Based on a 2006 play by Miura Daisuke that he wrote for his Potudo-ru theater troupe, the film begins with nine people – four women and five men, at a heya-con – a go-con in the room (heya) of the smooth-talking Koji (Niikura Kenta) and his chatty, bubbly girlfriend Tomoko.

Koji’s object, not openly stated, is to find a girlfriend for his socially awkward, looks-challenged pal Osamu. The party, however, soon devolves into noisy, boozy chaos, with everyone randomly trying to talk over everyone else – or so it seems. For this lengthy, noisy opening scene carefully plants plot threads that will grow, entwine and flower. That is, there a method – and a kind of genius, to this madness that only becomes apparent later on.

The film, we see, is about sexual attraction and repulsion, love and jealousy and the lies we tell each other – and ourselves. As might be expected, much of this drama plays out behind closed doors, but characters also live much of their lives, romantic and otherwise, on their cellphones (not, for some reason, smartphones), such as a guy who keeps sending emails to a girl he likes, though she never answers. His frustration at this silent treatment is funny, but his inability to stop himself – he keeps hitting “send” like a crazed rat in a lab experiment, is also indicative of how of-out-touch he actually is, as are other of the always-connected characters. The film’s vein of social satire is not limited to digital communications – or rather miscommunications. The characters are what the Japanese call “DQN” or dokyun, meaning low status/low information types who went to bottom-tier schools, work at part-time or temporary jobs and have limited prospects.

They are not stereotypical underachieving slackers, though. Koji, for example, is forever scheming and hustling, though his daytime job is impersonating women for a dodgy online chat site. They are also not the disadvantaged, rebellious youths of another generation’s “social problem” films. Instead they are drifting along from day to day, falling in and out of love and, once in a while, learning hard-to-accept truths about themselves and others.

Director One, whose nerd-in-love comedy Moteki was a hit with the Udine audience in 2012, gets laughs from these characters, but he also doesn’t turn them into cartoons. Instead, they closely resemble a big segment of today’s Japanese youth who are everywhere from shopping malls to online message boards, but seldom make the big media spotlight. DQNs may be common, but they also aren’t role models, especially if you happen to be looking at one in a mirror.